Making Connections/Schema

For readers, there must be a million autobiographies, since we seem to find,in book after book, the traces of our lives.  --Stan Persky

Schema or background knowledge is all that you as a reader bring to a book:  your personal history, all you've read or seen, your adventures, the experiences of your day-to-day life, your relationships, your passions.  All of this becomes your schema.  Schema helps the reader to understand the story better.

Making Connections/Schema

Text to Self:  With text-to-self connections, what you read reminds you of something from your own life.  These types of connections are particularly important because brain research shows that  "emotions drive attention, create meaning, and have their own memory pathways."  Making an emotional connection helps us remember what we read.

Text to Text:  With text-to-text connections, what you read reminds you of something else you have read or seen.

Text to World:  When text-to-world connections are made, what you read reminds you of something in the broader world.  Books, articles, and stories that make you think about something beyond your own life help you create text-to-world connections.

Crafting Session Tips for Making Connections

• Bring your background knowledge with you to everything you read.  Your memories and experiences have a critical impact on how you understand and respond to what you read.
• Activate what you know so that new ideas and information will "stick" in your existing storehouse of information.
• Note connecting points as you read to help you better remember and enjoy your reading.
• Apply background knowledge to help you go beyond the words on the page, allowing you to think back to past memories and experiences, to remember and understand similar texts, and to relate to the world around you.
• When you lack sufficient information to understand what's happening, seek more background knowledge.  Call on an outside source (teacher, friend, expert, dictionary, encyclopedia, reference book, Internet, and so on) to fill you in so you can carry on.
• Background knowledge is the cornerstone to the thinking strategies.  When you know how to activate pertinent background knowledge, you see more detailed mental images, ask deeper questions, and are better to extend your thinking.

Questioning/Why, What, Where, Who, and How

The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers.  But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared.  An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering.  Life has no such stopping places.  Life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by.  An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion.  It sharpens your eye for the road.

--Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Asking questions is indispensable for creating and strengthening the reader's ongoing dialogue with the page.  Questions help a reader clarify ideas and deepen understanding.  Questions lead readers deeper into a piece, setting up a dialogue with the author, sparking in the reader's minds what it is they care about.  If you ask questions as you read, you are awake.  You are thinking.  You are interacting with the words. 

Wonder keeps the imagination alive and curiosity well-tuned.  Asking questions is part of remaining open to wonder and alert to the world around you.  Asking questions is how we make sense of the world around us.  Asking questions is about taking risks and furthering passions and satisfying curiosities.  Questions indicate engagement.  They are a key ingredient in building superb readers.

Language to Use with Questioning:

• "I wonder. . ."
• "Why?"
• "What does this mean?"
• "That was a great question.  Do you have any more?"
• "Your question made me think of another question."
• "How come. . .?"

Crafting Session Tips for Questioning

• Your questions help you interact with the author, discover what you care about, and help you figure out what you want to learn.  Questions help you make sense of your reading.
• Questions keep your mind alert as you interact with the words.
• When you dive in with questions, your reading is enriched.
• Your best questions are ones you truly care about.
• Some questions don't have easy answers.  But all questions inspire thinking, generate discussion, or lead you to other sources.
• Questions are jumping-off point for going deeper into the meaning of the story or the information being learned.
• Questions keep you turning the pages to find out what happens next.  Questions send you on a search for answers.
• Questions lead you to new ideas, new perspectives, and additional questions.

Questions can be thin questions or thick questions.  Thin questions are easy to clarify by reading further or looking up a word. Thin questions can be answered with one or two words.  Thick questions are deeper questions that deal with more ideas and imponderables.  Thick questions often require the reader to infer the answers.  Thick questions are answered with more than one or two words.  To really get the readers to comprehend and think, we need to be asking a lot more thick questions than thin questions.

Drawing Inferences/Inferring

When the mind is thinking , it is talking to itself.

--Plato

 By using inference, you elaborate upon what you read, drawing conclusions, going beyond what is printed on the page.  The voice inside your head doesn't simply parrot back the author's words, but instead makes guesses, finds connecting points, asks questions.  You predict what might happen next, see a scene more clearly in your mind, figure out an unknown word, answer questions.  You personalize what you read to build a deeper meaning.

Language for Drawing Inferences

• "I predict . . ."
• "I think that . . .
• "My guess is . . ."
• "That's just what I thought . . ."
• "Now, this is a surprise . . ."
• "My conclusion here is . . ."

Crafting Session Tips for Inferring

• An inference elaborates on what you read as you draw conclusions that go beyond what is on the page.
• Create an inference by connecting your background knowledge with the clues in the text or pictures to form an opinion about what is not clearly stated.
• An inference can be the answer to a question raised as the story is read.
• A sensory image is an inference in picture form.
• You infer when you make educated guesses about what's going on in your reading.
• Infer the meaning of unknown words by using the context of the sentence and the clues in the picture to figure out what would make the most sense.
• An inference is a personal discovery about what the author didn't quite specifically write.
• Feeling empathy for characters, laughing at a joke, discovering an answer to a riddle, getting a sense about the setting of a story, reacting to facts, and solving a mystery are all part of inferential thinking.

Mental Images/Visualizing 

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one, you will feel that all of that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you:  the good and the bad, the ectasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

--Ernest Hemingway

This stragtegy focuses on the creation in your mind of sensory images--pictures, smells, tastes, sounds, feelings--a vital ingredient if reading is going to be vivid, exciting, memorable and fun.  As you muse over a poem, read a novel, or pause over a newspaper story, a picture forms in your mind.  Certain smells, tastes, sights, and feelings emerge, depending on what you're reading and what life experiences you bring to it.  Information comes to you through your senses.  This technique or strategy which is called visualizing or creating mental images,  triggers a wide range of memories and feelings.  These sensory images are critically important to children, because they make reading vivid and fun.  When sensory images form in a child's mind, it helps him organize them to help the story make sense.

Crafting Session Tips for Mental Images/Visualizing

• One image leads to another, helping you develop a deeper appreciation of what you read.
• Mental images are connected to your life experiences and memories.
• Mental images bring forth not only still snapshots of reading, but smells, tastes, feelings, and chills and thrills as well.
• Reading becomes three-dimensional when you call on your sensory images.  It makes reading fun!
• Sensory images help you remember what you read as you personalize characters, scenes, plot lines, social studies facts, and so on.
• When your reading camera shuts off, it's a warning that there might be a breakdown in comprehension.
• Watching words unwind like a movie in your mind helps you stay with the book longer.  You want to "see" the extended story or watch how science facts unfold.
• Using sensory images helps you move from a literal interpretation of the story to inferential thinking.  You'll see the concrete representation in your mind's eye, and then extend the image to new thinking.

 Determining Importance and Synthesizing

I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for one's self.

--George Washington Carver

These two strategies focus on two skills:  the ability to distinguish what's important in text and the ability to synthesize it, or determine the overall meaning and significance. Determining importance has to do with knowing why you're reading and then making decisions about which information or ideas are most critical to understanding the overall meaning of the piece.  The ability to figure out what's most important in text starts with several simple actions you should take before reading:  deciding your purpose for reading; consciously searching for new facts; reading with specific questions in mind; and understanding that layout, particularly in nonfiction text, gives valuable clues to what's important.  When in place these are powerful tools for determining what's important.

Synthesizing is closely linked to determining importance.  Basically, as we identify what's important, we interweave our thoughts to form a comprehensive perspective to make the whole greater that just the sum of its parts.  Synthesis is the process of ordering, recalling, retelling, and recreating into a coherent whole the information with which our minds are bombarded every day.  It is the uniquely human trait that permits us to sift through a myriad of details and focus on those pieces we need to know and remember.  Synthesizing is about organizing the different pieces to create a mosaic, a meaning, a beauty, greater than the sum of each shiny piece.

Crafting Session Tips for Determining Importance and Synthesizing

• Determining importance has to do with knowing why you're reading and then making decisions about what information or ideas are most critical to understanding the overall meaning of the piece.
• Knowing your purpose for reading is a big factor in determining what's important when you read.  If affects how carefully you read and has a impact on what you determine to be important.
• Noting text features helps you lift important information from the text.  Often the format of nonfiction text-for example, boxing information, boldfacing ideas, labeling pictures-alerts you to importance.
• To determine importance, you consciously prioritize information to make decisions about what's essential and what is less essential.
• Reading to add to background knowledge directs your search for important information.
• Launching a search to determine important information often starts with the generation of a question.
• Authors leave clues as to what  they think is important to remember.  Phrases like "as a result" and "in summary" alert you to watch for essential information.
• Summarize important information and then add your thinking as you synthesize to formulate new meaning.
•  Synthesize as you use the other reading strategies.  Take in the essential facts and ask, What does it all mean to me?