Making Sense of Sentences:

How to Read Hard Texts Without Getting Lost

Your student read the assignment. Out loud.  TWICE.  And still can't tell you what it said.  

They aren't lazy or incapable.

They haven't been given a useful process.

This 3-week introductory course teaches high school students a repeatable process for making sense of complicated sentences — and gives them a strategy they can use whenever the reading gets hard. 

This 3-week course combines self-paced lessons with weekly live sessions.

  • Breaking down the sentence: how to split a long, tangled sentence into parts and find its core: Who is doing what?
  • Figuring out unfamiliar words: how to use the rest of the sentence to work out what a hard word means without stopping to look it up. 
  • Putting it all back together in their own words: how to paraphrase a difficult sentence to check that they understood it. 
By the end of the course, students will have a repeatable process for any hard reading assignment, in English, history, science, or anything else!
  • Duration: 3 weeks / 3-4 hours per week
  • Format: Online instructional videos and worksheets, self-check quizzes and weekly live sessions
  • Students: High school Grades 9-11
  • Cost: $27 

For less than $10 a week, you can give your student

  • a step-by-step process for breaking down any difficult sentence
  • a way to figure out unfamiliar words — without immediately googling the word
  • the habit of checking their own understanding before moving on
  • strategies they can use in every class, not just English
  • the confidence to start a hard reading assignment instead of avoiding it 
And parents get a printable guide that provides:
  • Clear expectations of what "good" looks like 
  • Answer guides that help you help your student make sense of the practice worksheets
  • Tips for encouraging your student when they struggle
  • Peace of mind that your student is learning strategies to overcome the overwhelm of high-school-level work 

    Your teacher

    For 27 years, I watched students struggle to understand challenging texts. They would read a whole section multiple times and still couldn't tell me what it said. They weren't lazy or unwilling to try. But no one had ever shown them how to slow down and take a difficult sentence apart. 

    So I started teaching that exact process. Slow down. Find the main point of the sentence. Figure out the meaning of unknown words. Add the details back in. Before long, students stopped avoiding hard assignments.  More students completed the reading and the writing because they now knew what to say. Even better, they started using the same process in their other classes.

    After more than 3,000 students, I knew these strategies worked. But the system rarely gave me room to teach them the way students needed. That's why I founded Page and Pen Academy: to help students read challenging texts with confidence and write about them with something real to say. Making Sense of Sentences is where that starts.



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