Providing a balanced literacy experience is at the core of this outstanding series. The focus is on students ages 9.5 - 12.5 developing key comprehension skills and strategies while learning to read and compose a variety of text types. The series provides students with listening, reading, writing, speaking and viewing experiences with print, oral, digital and multimodal texts. The teaching/learning approach provides for focused guided reading opportunities that support the development of skills and strategies as well as developing comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning, and evaluate text. There are also opportunities to create texts and develop understanding of text structures as well as listening and speaking experiences that develop interaction skills and oral comprehension.