Making Connections

Making connections involves relating information you know (schema) to information you are reading/experiencing/learning. However, there is a catch. Making connections is not as easy as it sounds because some connections we make lead us astray from what we are reading, where meaningful connections allow us to better understand what we are reading. The following picture is a great demonstration: (anchor charts I (along with student input) made during my internship).

As you can see, meaningful connections bring you BACK to the text, sort of like an extra journey inside the book that is not actually written on the page. 

Connection Sentence Starters can help students make meaning of their connections when they are unsure of how to begin.

My wonderful class that I taught during internship gave me so many good examples of DEEP and FLAT connections that hopefully you can read on the picture! They loved that their ideas were validated with their initials and the little pink sayings that I put at the bottom. Some students would even write "whoop dee doo" beside connections that they thought did not really help them, it was a lot of fun!

Three major connections that can be focused on are making text-to-self connections (relating it to your own experiences), text-to-text connections (relating it to another text), and text-to-world connections (relating it to events of the world).

Encourage your students to use the language of the strategies in order to clarify for themselves what type of strategy they are using to figure out the text!