Crest
MAIN IDEA — the *peak* of the passage; the central message; the *one thing* the passage is most fundamentally about. Identifying the main idea is the foundation of reading comprehension.
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Crest grew up on a mountain. It was called Mount Comprehension. This was a real mountain. It stood in the kingdom's word-woods region. The word-woods were thick and green. They smelled like pine needles and damp earth. Mount Comprehension was the tallest peak in its small range. The famous ReadQuest academy sat nearby.
The mountain had a clear, sharp peak. It looked like a giant pointy hat. You could see it for miles in every direction. Travelers used the peak to find their way. If you were lost, you just looked up. The peak was the most important part of the land. Other mountains were taller in some spots. But Mount Comprehension's peak was known by everyone. Map-makers always drew it first on their scrolls. Everything else went around it.
Crest grew up in a village. It sat right at the mountain's foot. The village was named Footpath. Footpath was on the mountain's sunny southern side. Little houses with red roofs huddled together. Smoke curled from chimneys. Crest and her friends spent their childhood looking up. The peak was always there. It was like a silent, watchful friend.
It was the first thing they saw each morning. Sunlight hit the very top early. The valley below was still dark and sleepy. The peak would glow bright gold. It was the last thing they saw at night. The peak still glowed pink and purple. The village was already tucked into shadows. The stars would start to twinkle around it.
The ReadQuest ensemble
Crest is part of ReadQuest's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.
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Hunch
Inference (reading between the lines)
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Anchor
Evidence / textual citation
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Plume
Author's purpose / voice / tone
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Frame
Text structure (compare-contrast, sequence, cause-effect, problem-solution, description)
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Pith
Vocabulary in context (deriving word meaning from surrounding text)
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Yonder
Predicting — alert young-hare creature who reads the trail's clues to guess what's around the bend; a wrong guess just means the story surprised you
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Vista
Visualizing — dreamy young-deer creature who turns words into a movie in the mind; the writer gives the words, the reader gives the pictures
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Nettle
Questioning the text — question-quilled hedgehog who pokes a passage with why/how/what-if; asking questions means you're awake, not that you don't understand
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Sheaf
Summarizing — warm-handed harvester who gathers a whole passage into one tidy armful, keeping the important middle and letting loose details fall