Comprehension Strategies in the Classroom

As a pod, we have been working on many comprehension strategies. The comprehension strategies are so important. Not only do they engage the students in the text but they also force the students to stop and think about their own thinking (metacognition). Being aware of their own thinking or being metacognitive will help them in their future schooling and in everyday life.

Here are some strategies that we have been working on: 

Making connections: Text to self (when a book reminds us of our own lives), Text to text (when one book reminds us of another), and text to world (when a book reminds us of something happening in the world around us).

During this lesson we compared two books: "Now One Foot, Now the Other" by Tomie DePaola and "The Two of them" by Aliki. As you can see  in our venn diagram there were many similarities between these two books. We made many text to text connections. 

 Visualizing: Making mental images as we read or making a movie in our mind.

Jacob is also practicing being aware of the movies that play in our mind while we read or hear a story!

Evan trying to get a mental image in his  head while Mrs. Odom reads a poem.

For this activity the students listened to a poem ("Honey, I Love" by Eloise Greenfield). As they listened the students stopped at various points to draw their mental images during the beginning, the middle and the end.  

The wonderful thing about our comprehension strategies is that soon the students will be using them  when they read any text without even realizing it. They will begin to use several strategies while reading one text. As you can see on our poem, some of the students were not only visualizing but also making connections (the green post-it on the chart is one way that we mark our thinking, in this case it was a text to self connection). Awesome thinking! 

We are working hard on getting good mental images!

Our mental images, beginning, middle & end. Notice that our mental images change as we read and that all of our images are different. If you ask your child they will tell why! It's because our schemas (or our background knowledge) are different!

We will continue to learn more comprehension strategies throughout the year. I'm so excited! Stay tuned into our blog for more updates!