Metacognition!

This year students will be learning many comprehension strategies to help them understand and think more deeply about what they are reading.  First teaching students to be metacognitive about their reading, sets the foundation for the rest of the year. Students learned that real reading means you are reading the text AND thinking!

 To introduce this strategy in a concrete way we built a reading salad.  Before I began reading, Oliver Button is a Sissy by Tomie dePaola, I modeled fake reading.  I read a paragraph out loud to the class and asked what they thought of me as a reader.  Many children said I was a good reader, because I could read all of the words.  Then I explained that I had no idea what I read, because I was not thinking while I was reading.  

 While I read Oliver Button is a Sissy, I had two volunteers in charge of creating the reading salad.  We talked about just like a salad could be a mixture of tomatoes and lettuce reading is a mixture of words and thoughts.  The green pieces of paper in the thinking bowl represented our thoughts, while the red pieces of paper in the text bowl represented the words.  Each time I read a page I pointed to my mouth and a student would place a red/text piece of paper into the large salad bowl.  Each time I had a thought while I read, I shared it with the class and pointed to my head.  The volunteer would place a green piece of paper into the salad bowl. When we finished we counted the pieces and the class concluded that there were more thoughts in the bowl!

The following day came the thought bubble.  This again, is to model that while real readers read they have a "conversation voice" inside their head thinking about the text.  Students took turns sharing their thoughts with the class as I read the story Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell to the class. 

During Reader's Workshop, students have been putting their metacognition skills to work!  Their task during reading has been to stop, think, and jot their thoughts onto at least three post-it notes. 

They have bookmarks that they can refer to in order to help guide their thinking or provide them with a sentence starter.  Additionally, they are encouraged to peek back at our anchor chart for extra support!