Comprehension Connections

1
Comprehension Connections

• Linked to
• Strategies That Work

2
Best Way to Teach Comprehension Strategies

• Teacher Modeling
• Guided Practice
• Independent Practice
• Application of the Strategy in Real Reading
  Situations

3
Best Practice Instruction Showing Kids How

• Reading aloud
• Thinking aloud and coding the text
• Lifting text
• Reasoning through the text
• Providing anchor experiences
• Rereading for deeper meaning

4
Strategies That Work

• Making Connections
• Visualizing
• Determining Importance
• Drawing Inferences
• Asking Questions
• Synthesizing Information

5
Tanny McGregor

• This is just what I want to do for children
  Provide concrete instruction that jump-starts
  them into the realm of strategic thinking. With
  each lesson I construct, I want to empower
  students with tools of language, building their
  confidence as they bridge the known to the new.
  For many of them it will be a new deal, where
  thinking replaces the right answer, where meaning
  is created and not simply received.

6
Metacognition Its the thought that counts

• Real Reading Salad
• Warriors of God
• Fake out when I read. Fake reading
• I Read It, but I Dont Get It, Chris Tovani 2001
• Dont Laugh at Me (use for salad)
• Think and Text bowls
• Venn Diagram (book and head)
• The Thought Bubble
• Buzzy the Bumblebee, Denise Brennan-Nelson
• Animals Asleep, Sneed Collard

7
What Good Readers Do

• Track their own thinking
• Notice when they lose focus
• Stop and go back
• Reread to understand
• Read ahead to find meaning
• Identify what is causing the confusion
• Know that every question is important
• Think critically and are able to disagree
• Match the difficulty with the strategy that will
  best solve it

8
Drawing Inferences

• Every inference must be directly supported by
  evidence
• The Garbage Story .
• Formula charts for inference

9
Asking Questions

• Children believe that asking questions is for
  dummies, and they know that far too many adults
  dont appreciate inquisitive minds. Even worse,
  excessive testing has taught students to spend
  their energies in pursuit of the one right
  answer, never mind any questions that the reader
  might have.
• Children enter school as question marks ? and
  come out as periods .

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Questioning

• The Rock.special to me
• Questioning Thinking Stems Poster
• The author strings you along and your questions
  fuel the drive to keep reading
• The Lemonade Crime
• Books by David Wiesner (wordless)
• Free Fall
• Tuesday
• Sector 7

11
Quotes about Questioning

• Ones first step in wisdom is to question
  everything. Lichtenberg, scientist
• The important thing is not to stop questioning.
  Einstein
• The answers arent important reallyWhats
  important is know all the questions.Snyder,
  author
• It is better to know some of the questions than
  all of the answers.Thurber, humorist
• Not to know is bad not to wish to know is
  worse.African proverb
• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his
  answers. Voltaire, philosopher
• All men by nature desire to know. Aristotle,
  philosopher
• The desire to know is natural to good men.
  DaVinci, artist

12
Determining Importance

• Children need to know how to single out and
  process what is meaningful and how to recognize
  and set aside distractions in text and in daily
  life.
• CNN (text and images in 5 minutes)
• Graphs
• Maps
• Titles
• Subheadings
• Bulleted information
• Dow, NASDAQ, SP
• Pictures within pictures
• Scrolling weather and news
• Three changes of anchors and sets
• Time in three zones
• Correspondents names and credits

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Determining Importance

• Determining Importance chart
• My Purse
• Straining the Spaghetti
• A Circle of Friends by Giora Carmi
• Thats Wild books in Bookrooms
• In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to
  drown in all the information. DAngelo, author
• The truth is more important than the facts.
  Frank Lloyd Wright
• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
  Einstein
• Most of the important things in the world have
  been accomplished by people who have kept on
  trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
  Carnegie

14
Synthesizing

• The Nesting Dolls
• All dolls lined up in ascending order
• The bigger I get, the bigger my thinking gets.
• I grow and change and so does my thinking.
• It reminds me of what happens in cartoons, when a
  snowball rolls down a hill.
• When I read new information, I just add it to
  stuff I already know.
• My thinking used to be one thing, but now it is
  something else.

15

• Put the nesting dolls together Largest stands
  alone
• Big ideas are made up of little ideas.
• You cant always tell how much thinking happened
  to get to a big idea.
• We hold all of our thinking inside of us.
• Our best thinking starts out with something
  small.
• The Littlest Matryoshka, Corrine Demas Bliss
• Spiral (Spiral slides, notebook, lollipops,
  cinnamon rolls)

16

• The Metacognition Umbrella