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 read.
I knew just what she was talking about because many of our kids get loads of Toolkit instruction and still don't master the skills or pass the WASL. Finally, someone else who sees the downside of the toolkit, despite loving it! If you cannot wait to order the book like me, I'll tell you now it's: Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading
She told us it's in her top five of must have books; me too! The anchor or wall charts are included as pictures, most of the high-interest lesson activities have multiple options for a lesson and analogy. For example, you can teach determining importance by straining noodles from a pan, showing what's in your purse or using a flashlight in a dark room and link the concrete experience to an analogy. Chants or songs are also a part of learning the strategies.
Her demo covered the priming for inference. The concrete experience is a story about her neighbors that goes roughly as follows:
"I've lived in my home for over a year and I've never meet or even seen my neighbors. And I'm really curious about who they are and what they're like. So the other day, when I saw their garbage out, I couldn't help but grab it without even thinking about it."
One teacher had to ask if she was serious, which of course, she wasn't. Needless to say we were all listening, wanting to hear what she had to say.
She pulls up the bag, opens it up and one at a time we make inferences about what the garbage tells us about the mysterious neighbors.
This would totally work because it's so novel, which students love, and it provides lots of turn and talk or pair-share talk time.
When we shared, our inferences were recorded on the anchor chart along with our evidence or schema. If the responses didn't provide evidence, she would ask "what makes you think/infer that," or something along those lines.
After this lesson, there would be another follow up lesson where students infer what a picture might be after seeing only a little piece at a time. Afterwards, students would be ready for an interactive read-aloud, Stephanie Harvey style, which involved modeling, guided practice, paired and independent practice, or the guided release model: I do, we do, you do.
This will really change my teaching! I'll post pics of my anchor charts when I get a chance.
