Schema: sea, setting Questions to activate background knowledge: Can you think of another time in history where a group of people have been treated unfairly because of the color of their skin? Can you imagine being taken away from your family because of your ethnicity? Why is the title so far from the sea when [...]
Schema: teachers after school may grade papers, meet with other teachers, play with the class pet, call parents, make copies, go home Text-to-Text Connections: Both books are about teachers and what they do at school; Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. Compare and Contrast: What teachers do during school with what they do after [...]
Schema: windy days Personification: The wind takes on human traits and speaks in this tale. Cause and Effect: Because the wind blows the sisters’ cornmeal away, the effect is that Willa is determined to get it back or get something in return. Characterization: Willa is a strong woman character. She can be described as fearless [...]
Schema: March winds, the old saying that “March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb,” chasing something that has blown away Cause and Effect: Because it was so windy, the effect is that everything is blowing away Predicting: Ask the students to predict what is going to blow away next. There are [...]
Schema: sticks, playing with sticks Text-to-Text Connections: Over in the Meadow, an old rhyme about the animals in a meadow; the rhyme goes something like, “over in the meadow in the sand and the sun lived an old mother turtle and her little turtle one…” See the lyrics Also a connection with the Gingerbread Man [...]
Schema: making tamales, admiring jewelry Text-to-Self Connections: taking something without permission, not wanting to get caught, getting together with relatives for the holidays, seeing something and then remembering something you forgot about Predicting: Predict what Maria is going to do when her mother leaves to answer the phone. Drawing Conclusions: What conclusion does Maria come [...]
Schema: ice from the fridge, icebergs Text-to-text Connections: Gingerbread Man stories, stories where characters are being chased Compare and Contrast: the animals that want to eat or cool off with the ice cube to characters in other versions of the Gingerbread Man. Compare the whale with the fox in the original story. Sequencing: Sequence from [...]
Schema: sheep, wool, sweaters, cloaks, the invisible cloak in the Harry Potter stories Text-to-Text Connections: These two books make a big connection in that they both talk about how wool is used to create a garment. Charlie shares more technical information about the process. Red Berry shows how the words used to create fabric can [...]
Making Thinking Visible: The terms I am explaining below work together to create connections that will help young children to increase their reading comprehension. For years we have taught reading in abstract terms and many children do become great readers by being exposed to books and reading. Some of us need something more concrete to [...]
Schema: turtles, desert settings, Grandma’s house looks like a sand dome Text-to-text connection: other retellings of Little Red Riding Hood Predicting: What do you predict the animals will do in order to save the turtles from the coyote? Cause and Effect: Because Tortuga’s friends made the noise at Tortuga’s grandmother’s house, the effect is that [...]
Subscribe in a reader