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
Mosaic of Thought, Ellen Keen
Strategies That Work, Harvey & Goudvia
On Solid Ground, Sharon Taberski

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.”
Comprehension Connections, Tanny McGregor

6. Metacognition: It’s the thought that counts
Real Reading Salad
Warriors of God
Fake out when I read…. Fake reading
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It, Chris Tovani 2001
Don’t 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
Reading Salad
Red and green cut up paper
2 small bowls (TEXT …. THINKING)
Large bowl (The Real Reading Salad)
Don’t Laugh at Me,
Venn Diagram – book & head
Thought Bubble
Buzzy the Bumblebee
Animals Asleep

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 The Garbage Story …. Formula charts for inference
Every inference must be directly supported by evidence
The Garbage Story ….
Formula charts for inference
Bag of garbage
Formula charts for Inference

9. Asking Questions
Children believe that asking questions is for ‘dummies’, and they know that far too many adults don’t 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 .”

10. Questioning The Rock….special to me The Lemonade Crime
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
Rock
Thinking stems poster
The Lemonade Crime
Wordless Books
Free Fall
Tuesday
Sector 7

11. Quotes about Questioning
“One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything.” Lichtenberg, scientist
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Einstein
“The answers aren’t important really…What’s 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, S&P
Pictures within pictures
Scrolling weather and news
Three changes of anchors and sets
Time in three zones
Correspondents’ names and credits

13. Determining Importance
Determining Importance chart
My Purse
Straining the Spaghetti
A Circle of Friends by Giora Carmi
That’s Wild books in Bookrooms
“In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information.” D’Angelo, 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
Determining Importance chart
Purse
Spaghetti
That’s Wild Books

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.
The Nesting Dolls

15. Spiral (Spiral slides, notebook, lollipops, cinnamon rolls)
Put the nesting dolls together – Largest stands alone
Big ideas are made up of little ideas.
You can’t 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)
The Littlest Matryoshka

16. The Metacognition Umbrella