Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading - Softcover

Inferring, questioning, determining importance. It's not easy to explain these abstract reading strategies to elementary readers, yet knowing how they work and how to use them is an important first step to connecting with texts. Fortunately Tanny McGregor has developed visual, tangible, everyday lessons that make abstract thinking concrete and that can help every child in your classroom make more effective use of reading comprehension strategies.

Comprehension Connections is a guide to developing children's ability to fully understand texts by making the comprehension process achievable, accessible, and incremental. McGregor's approach sequences stages of learning for each strategy that take students from a fun object lesson to a nuanced and lasting understanding. Her lessons build bridges between the concrete and the abstract by incorporating writing, discussion, song, art, and movement into a web of creative connections that reinforce each strategy on a variety of levels. All the while Comprehension Connections offers an inside look at the dynamic of McGregor's teaching, showing you how her ideas look in action, and including the language she uses and that she encourages her students to use as they build their facility with:

• schema
• inferring
• questioning
• determining importance
• visualizing
• synthesizing.

Many students struggle to understand what it is they are supposed to do as they learn to read strategically. Help them make connections to the ideas behind reading and watch as your readers go deeper into texts than ever before.

The smash-hit Comprehension Connections introduced teachers across the country to the imaginative, inspiring, and practical teaching of Tanny McGregor. Now Genre Connections brings to teaching genre the same creativity and can-do spirit that has helped hundreds of thousands of practitioners improve. Tanny has been teaching and learning in Cincinnati for more than two decades. She is a staff developer, a nationally-known keynoter and workshop presenter, and a member of Heinemann Professional Development Services. In addition to Comprehension Connections and Genre Connections, she is a coauthor of the Heinemann title Comprehension Going Forward. Tanny online Tanny's voice jumps off the page. If you'd like to hear that voice in person, then listen to her appearance on Education Talk Radio.