Welcome to third grade!
The new school year is filled with fun and excitement. We have already learned so much in the last 2 months, but there is much more to come.
We have been learning various reading skills and strategies to help with reading comprehension. We learned about characters/setting, visualization, sequencing, and main ideas/details, to name a few. Last week, we focused our reading skill/strategy on “making connections.” This strategy encourages students to stop and connect with what is happening in the story.
Students learned that there are 3 ways to make a connection: 1) text-to-self, 2) text -to-text, 3) text-to-world. When students make connections between a book and their own lives (text-to-self), they feel empathy for the characters and become invested in the story. They have an easier time remembering the story when they feel a personal connection. Many of our students have already begun to make connections between other books they’ve read in the past (text-to-text). Eventually they will make connections to the world (text-to-world). This will open the door to bigger concepts and understandings.
Here’s how a few students made their connections with a story they read in class about the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon.
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“This story reminds me of when I visited the Grand Canyon with my family.” (text-to-self)
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“I visited Bryce Canyon last summer and it looks just like the Grand Canyon.” (text-to-self)
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“This story reminds me of another story I read about Mt. Rushmore because it was expository nonfiction and gave a lot of facts and information.” (text-to-text)