Reading Activities / The 4 Cs
The 4 Cs
Connect, challenge, concept, change
Four responses to one text - a connection, a challenge, a concept and a change. It works best with non-fiction, and the challenge is the one children skip.
Work through them on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free to try
The sheet it prints
What are the 4 Cs - connect, challenge, concept, change?
The 4 Cs asks four different questions of one text: what you can connect it to, what you would challenge, what one big concept sits underneath it, and what has changed in your thinking. It is a thinking routine developed by Project Zero, a research centre at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; this sheet is our own, inspired by it.
Which C do children skip?
Challenge, every time. Connecting is comfortable and children are practised at it. Disagreeing with something printed in a book feels like being wrong out loud, so they leave the box empty or write something safe. If you only teach one of the four properly, teach that one.
Why does it work best with non-fiction?
Because a text with a claim in it gives them something to argue with. A story can be enjoyed without being questioned; an article saying screen time is bad for you cannot. Newspaper reports, persuasive writing and information texts all give the Challenge box something real to bite on.
How do you run it on the whiteboard?
Take the four in order - they get harder as they go, and Change only makes sense once the first three have happened. Model Challenge yourself first, out loud, disagreeing with the text in front of the class. Give it twenty-five minutes for a full text.
How do you make it harder or easier?
To start, do Connect and Challenge only, and supply a sentence stem for each. Then add Concept. The hardest is Change, because it asks a child to describe their own thinking before and after, which is genuinely difficult and worth naming as such when they manage it.
Say out loud that you are allowed to disagree with a published writer, because most children do not believe it. The first time I ran this the Challenge column was empty across the whole class, and the fix was not a better explanation - it was doing it myself, badly, in front of them, and picking an argument with a paragraph everyone had just agreed with. After that they would not stop. Keep the best Challenge from each lesson on the wall; it changes what the class thinks reading is for.
Try it now
Take any news article aimed at children and do Challenge first, out of order, before anyone gets comfortable. It sets the tone for the other three.
Other reading activities
See all 29 reading activities →
Where this routine comes from: the Connect, Challenge, Concept, Change (the 4 C’s) thinking routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Sage Teachers is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Harvard University or Project Zero. The prompts and the wording on this page are our own.
Written by a practising primary school teacher, and part of the free-to-try Reading Activities set on Sage Teachers. Last checked August 2026. The activity is free to try - every teacher gets 20 free goes - and opening an activity uses one token, printing included.