January Literacy Lab

Jane and I attended the Comprehension Strategies Learning Lab in Mission last night. Katy and Erin really did a great job. The information was relevant to the work we are doing in our classrooms. I highly recommend you attend. Click here for a schedule of the Learning Labs.

Here are a few key discussion points from the meeting:

Teachers, we have access to the Choice Literacy website as well as the Daily Cafe. You should have received an email earlier in the year with your passwords. If you don't have them you can go to the site, go to lost password and type in your TCSD address. If you don't receive an email with a password, let Katy or Erin know.

Here are a couple of additional sites that were mentioned:
Mosaic Listserv
The Reading Lady

• I was snooping around on the Reading Lady site and found a page with Comprehension Strategy posters. Click here. 

 Metacognitive Strategies - Thinking Strategies - (from Mosaic of Thought and Strategies that Work)

• Monitoring for Meaning - knowing when you know, knowing when you don't know
• Using and Creating Schema - making connections between new and the known, building and activating background knowledge
• Asking Questions - generating questions before, during, and after reading that lead you deeper into the text
• Inferring - combining back ground knowledge with information from the text to predict, conclude, make judgements, interpret
• Mental/Sensory Imagery - creating mental images to deepen and stretch meaning
• Determining Importance - deciding what matters most, what is worth remembering
• Synthesizing - creating an evolution of meaning by combining understanding with knowledge from other texts/sources.

Katy and Erin recommended that we don't try teaching all seven of these strategies every year, but rather that we decide as grades what 1 or 2 concepts should be taught each year. So, kindergarten would focus on certain concepts, 1st grade would focus on certain concepts, etc.

Katy and Erin had example of anchor charts to use with each concept. Jane and I both wrote down examples. If you are interested in seeing our notes let us know.

We also watched several videos that modeled these strategies. The videos are posted on the Choice Literacy and Daily Cafe sites.

Lastly, they gave us a Think Aloud strategies script. It's a script on how to use Think Alouds to teach the Thinking Strategies. Again, please let us know if you would like a copy of the script.