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.
Since our 4th and 5th graders were learning about determining importance from Stephanie Harvey's Comprehension Toolkit, and struggling with it, I thought I'd align with their efforts. I began with a little activity that involved emptying my bag (it could have been my purse) and determining what thing or things were most important. Since then, I have been able to refer back to that activity when we work on determining importance. One follow up activity involved getting the main idea from a song, which was fairly popular as well.
While I didn't have time to follow the whole comprehension connections sequence, my students, with further instruction, are able to make what we call 'Main Idea Statements' about text they read. I hope to become more familiar with Comprehension Connections so I can continue to use pieces here and there in my teaching.
This style of teaching has me making connections with my learning about Art integration and critical thinking skills. That is the beauty of Comprehension Connections: we are teaching students how to be critical thinkers and then we help them apply it to text! Brilliant!
