Making Connections to Text Freebie

Have you ever been to an inservice that validates everything you know about teaching students, and that completely recharges your batteries?  I am so excited because I just sat through my second inservice provided by Stephanie Harvey, the co-author of Strategies that Work (amazing book- affiliate links below).

About two and a half years ago, our district purchased and passed out Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis' The Primary Comprehension Toolkit.   It is a 6 book kit that leads you through lessons on how to teach meaningful reading strategies to your students, including:  Monitoring Comprehension, Making Connections, Questioning, Inferring and Visualizing, Determining Importance, and Summarizing/Synthesizing.  We were told we would receive training shortly.  Hmmm....how's your math?

I began using the toolkit the very first year we received it.  I had just read Strategies That Work, Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann, and Reading with Meaning by Debbie Miller.  All of these books talk about using real books, not basals, at students' reading levels, to teach them how to comprehend text.  This way of teaching made complete sense to me, and I have never looked back.

My students and I are just finishing up Book 1 in the Toolkit, on Monitoring Comprehension.  In this book, we have spent many weeks working on identifying and understanding the importance of Non-Fiction Text Features.  We also created our own Non-Fiction Text Feature Books.  We will refer to them all year long. (I use small anchor charts and templates provided for FREE! on TeacherPayTeachers.  Click HERE to see all the FREE resources available).

Our next step is to create Teaching Books.  Students will choose a topic they want to research and become an "expert" on.  They will create a teaching book to share with the class.  They are so excited.  I will keep you posted on our progress.

Getting back to today, Jill deGoede who works for Stephanie Harvey's consulting company, presented and did a demo lesson on Making Connections.  It is so powerful to see other teachers at work.  I wish we all had more opportunities to get into each other's classrooms.

Anyway, today's inservice inspired me to create a couple of things that I will begin using in my classroom when teaching students how to Make Connections.  You can download your own free copy by clicking on the sample images below.

Here we try to communicate to students that their understanding of the text is enriched by their background knowledge (or schema), similar texts or themes, and events going on around them.

The response sheets included in the freebie above, focus on leading students to be aware of the different connections readers can make: 

1) text-to-self: when something in the book reminds a reader of their own life or experiences, 

2) text-to-text: when something in a book reminds them of something in another book, and 

3) text-to-world: something in the book reminds students of something that is, or has, happened in the world.

Another important teaching point is to get students to discern between important connections (connections that enhance reading comprehension) and interesting connections (connections that do not add to the understanding of the text.) There is a graphic organizer included to address this important difference, as well. I hope you will find these resources useful.

I would love to hear your thoughts on teaching students to Make Connections.

For more helpful tips, tools, and resources for improving students' reading comprehension, follow me on Pinterest!