Into the Book
Mrs. Pingle’s class models successful strategies for increasing comprehension in reading. Each program focuses on a specific reading strategy and shows several different ways that learners use the strategy to increase their enjoyment and understanding of the text. Viewers even get to look into a student’s imagination for clever insights into the strategies at work.
1. Using Prior Knowledge: To teach the students the strategy of activating prior knowledge. During a read-aloud of The Story of Kate Shelley, Emmet is so engaged that he goes “into the book” and helps Kate. He then uses the strategy to help him with his rock climbing.
2. Making Connections: To teach students how to make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using a newspaper article. During self-selected reading, Julia goes into her book, where she is able to help Cass by making connections. Later the strategy is useful in her karate class.
3. Questioning: Mrs. Pingel uses a National Geographic magazine to model the questioning strategy. During a science lesson, Kamilah’s own questions pull her into her Ranger Rick article about otters, where the otters themselves help her answer her questions. She later uses her new questioning skills to help a frantic zookeeper.
4. Visualizing: Explore the process further during a small group guided reading lesson. Using the five senses to visualize makes the story so real for one of the students that he is drawn literally “into the book.” Thanks to the new understanding of the strategy, he is able to help a character in the story get out of a bind. Later, he applies the strategy to solve a problem of his own.
5. Inferring: Mrs. Pingel uses dance to introduce her students to the strategy of inferring. When the class receives letters from their Canadian pen pals, Lizzy realizes she needs to infer to understand hers. She soon finds herself inside a letter filled with humor and adventure. She later uses inferring to solve a mystery in her own attic.
6. Summarizing: Mrs. Pingel models the summarizing strategy with a book of short biographies about National Park rangers. As they search for what is important in the stories during paired reading, Conlin goes into his story and uses the strategy to save an injured hiker. His newfound summarizing abilities even help him during games at the park with his friends.
7. Evaluating: While students are doing research for a science project, Mrs. Pingel realizes they are ready for a new strategy. She introduces evaluating using examples from students’ own lives and class book reviews. Malaika begins evaluating her space resources, and is drawn into a NASA Web site, where she has to use the strategy to get out of a space emergency in her own rocket ship. She also manages to use the strategy to get a new dog from the Humane Society.
8. Synthesizing: Mrs. Pingel’s students enjoy learning to synthesize while reading the back of a candy wrapper. During independent reading, the new strategy pulls Kamilah into the poem Casey at the Bat, where she develops a new perspective on the poem that she later demonstrates in a puppet show. She is also able to synthesize her knowledge of baseball and her town into a winning mascot for her local team.
9. Using Strategies Together: As the school year draws to a close, Mrs. Pingel’s students demonstrate their expertise with learning comprehension strategies during small group book discussions. Persuaded that they are now strategic readers, Mrs. Pingel herself leads the whole class into her own version of Hansel and Gretel for a surprise finale to the series.
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