[MOSAIC] interesting first grade talk

[Lindsey Jean Bishop]

Great posting "Kukonis"!

Visualizing and making connections are definitely priceless components  
of strategies instruction.  Your student explaining he was working  
with the author, despite perhaps getting a bit too far out on a  
personal tangent, is awesome!  Obviously your teaching and modeling of  
text-to-self-connections helped him find meaning in what you were  
reading.  Reigning him back in to help him understand the details of  
the text will likely come more easily and hold greater meaning to him,  
now that he feels personally connected to/invested in the text.   In  
my opinion, it is far better for this to happen than for a student to  
be able to coomprehend a story perfectly while feeling little or no  
personal connection to it.

Also, you provide another good reason why we should be using more  
nonfiction texts in all grades, especially in K-3! It seems like the  
visualizing piece is almost scaffolded a bit better for our students  
when using the more concrete non-fiction than fiction.

I agree when you emphasize how critical making connections is  
(text-to-text, text-to-self, and/or text-to-world).  I am wondering if  
you or anyone else has favorite ways to teach/model how and why we  
need to be making these connections while reading?

Thank you!
Lindsey