critical thinking

After my 'aha' moment with Comprehension Connections I bought the book all excited to put it to use. I'm an ELL support teacher with over 70 students so I don't provide the daily read alouds and mini-lessons for most of my students. More often than not I have 15-30 minutes with students to do guided reading and/or fluency work. While I haven't been able to try as much as I'd like so far, I have liked how simple the lesson ideas have been for me and students.

Today I had one of those 'aha' moments, not in my classroom but at a training focused on blending National Urban Alliance (NUA) strategies, like thinking maps, and balanced literacy.  A coach involved in the training demoed a series of lessons on priming students for comprehension strategies with text.  She prefaced the demo by sharing that when she taught Stephanie Harvey's Comprehension Toolkit lessons, her students never had the comments that Stephanie's students did or went away with the same level of understanding.  In retrospect, she realized that when introducing students to a comprehension strategy with the Comprehension Toolkit, she was requiring students to learn a new strategy, a new text, a new subject and a challenging

Karen Hesse received a Newberry Medal for Out of the Dust.  For me, Out of the Dust was a gut wrenchingly beautiful novel.  Today I read The Music of Dolphins, which I chose only vaguely recognizing the authors name at the time.  (I'd make for an awful librarian, other than loving to devour books greedily.) 

The Publishers Weekly quote on the back says it best, The Music of Dolphins "poignantly explores...what it means to be human."