Re: Connecting stories

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Text to self is very easy - at least for me. I am an
inclusion teacher and the regular ed teacher asked me to work
on this because the children weren't making connections. This
was evident in anthology work and on the DRAs.

I used my chapter book The Treasure of Health and Happiness,
but you could use any book. This is what I did. It worked and
I even presented the method at the recent state reading
conference I was invited to as an author/illustrator and
presenter.

I took my book along with long blank sentence strips and
markers to a classroom. I told the children that I was going
to read a chapter (actually I brought enough copies so the
kids could read along with me) to the group and as soon as
they could make a personal connection to raise their hand.
As an example, after I read the first few sentences, I made a
simple connection, "I feel hot!" and I wrote it on a sentence
strip. The kids caught on right away and their connections
came quickly: I took swimming lessons. My sister runs faster
than me. Once, a mosquito buzzed around my head. I left
time at the end of the period so that they could write a
paragraph about one of their connections. This was so popular
that I plan on going back to this class with my chapter book
every week to continue. It will take a bit of thinking about
how to make a text-to-text connection with this book and
their anthology material, but it can be done.

The key was the example, the sentence trips, and the immediacy
of the activity. Instead of having them make the connection
AFTER the reading when they maybe forgot, they were allowed
to raise their hands right away and I stopped reading and
wrote their connections down. I also accepted simple
connections, but the depth came out in their writing. It's
a FUN activity.

> I need ideas to connect stories using Text to text, text
> to self and text to world. Any help or books that work
> well to this subject?

carolgoodrow.com

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