I read the article Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers. I chose the topic of kindergartners and their comprehension because I have a child in kindergarten and I’m curious to learn strategies for his age group as opposed to the 5th grade strategies that I use in my own classroom.

I was immediately enthralled with her strategy in the article of having students raise their hands in different forms to indicate the contribution they intended to make (whether it be a connection or a visual mental movie). The article called this meaning construction. I thought this was ingenious and was building the children’s higher level of thinking capabilities already. I have always been told that you must activate background knowledge and allow students to search within their schema's to make connections.I never quite understood that activating and discussing schema's was the 1st step in comprehension skills. I knew it was important but I never recognized it as the basic foundation.

She then allowed the students to make connections, visualize and then ask questions, or infer. This was her way of teaching the strategies without the children ever understanding that they were learning. The students seem to believe they were merely interacting and taking part of the reading of the story. I think that her strategy was genius! The students were engaged and it was obvious in her examples of her anchor charts where she credits each child with the questions that he or she posed to the whole group.

I think I will try the strategy of having students share their mental movies or connections in various content areas. Such as social studies: I could have students share their schema's about particular battles or wars and then allow other students to voice questions or concerns that they wish to be addressed. It is whole-group engagement that could take our learning to a whole new level!

LM4

I enjoyed doing the vocabulary activity. I have the fortune of being able to use most of our assignments in my 5^th grade classroom but I had never thought to introduce vocabulary this way. I think it is critical to allow our students to express understanding in numerous ways. I appreciate that this strategy includes writing, art and higher order of thinking by allowing the students to express their understanding by forming definitions in their own words.

I plan to use this strategy at the beginning of more difficult content areas such as science with electricity and social studies when studying restoration after the Civil War. I hope that my students will add to their charts throughout the instructions and that, each time, their depiction of their understanding will be more and more complex.

I see that this strategy could be introduced and completed using very minimal time yet could have lasting impacts in children learning and retaining their knowledge. I also believe we will see an increase in the usage of the vocabulary from content areas as students master the ability to break words apart for greater understanding.