Metacognitive Reading Strategies #3

1. Metacognitive Reading Strategies #3 MAKING CONNECTIONS Making Connections

2. Making Connections: an Overview • What is? • Making connections is a great metacognitive reading strategy to use to make reading more interesting, increase reading comprehension, and make texts more memorable. • There are three major types of connections you can make when reading: text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world.

3. Making Connections: Text-to-text • What is it? • A text-to-text connection is when you are reading and you make some sort of connection to another text you have read in the past (e.g., a newspaper, magazine, advertisement or book). • For example, when I was reading chapter one of Steinbeck’s The Pearl, I was thinking about how Kino hears music (his “song of the family”, or “song of evil, etc”) based on the everyday things around him. I thought this was strange at first, but then I thought of the book, A Mango Shaped Space and how a young girl sees colors in everything around her, and thought that maybe Kino wasn’t that weird after all; that he just sees his world a little differently, which is interesting. • This is an example of making a text-to-text connection—connecting one text with another.

4. Making Connections: Text-to-self • What is it? • A text-to-self connection is a bit more personal. This happens when you are reading one text and you relate it to something in your own life or experiences. • Let me give you another example of me doing this when I read chapter one. When I was reading the part about Coyotito being stung by the scorpion on page 7, I thought about when I got stung by a scorpion a few years ago and how much it hurt. At first I thought, “Well Coyotito can’t die, I mean it hurts and all, but I was fine!” But then I thought a bit more about how much smaller and more fragile a little baby is than me (a grown adult), and I started to worry for poor Coyotito. Because I connected what was going on in the book to my own feelings and memories, this is an example of a text-to-self connection.

5. Making Connections: Text-to-world • What is it? • A text-to-world connection is when you read and connect the text you are reading to some larger world event—bigger than another book, bigger than you. It could be an event in history, a movie you’ve seen, or another country you’ve been to—it could be a lot of things! • Take a quick reread of the beginning of chapter two of The Pearl together and try to make this last connection on your own(pg14). What kind of text-to-world connection could you make here? • (I made text-to-word connections with the first paragraph and Filipino bancas, Boracay, and the year that I lived in Mexico and visited the Pacific coast—how about you?)

6. Making Connections: Your turn • Now reread chapter two and fill out the following chart in your notebooks—don’t forget to mark the page numbers! MAKING CONNECTIONS

7. Making Connections: Your turn • Once you have reread chapter two and noted your connections in your notebooks, please write your paragraph(s) as you have for your past two strategies (creating sensory images and fix-up strategies) • Remember, your paragraph(s) should include what making connections is and when and why you use it! • Good luck! • 