Building Comprehension Strategies Chapter 1

I just finished reading this chapter and here are some ideas I took from it.

1) Metacognition is important to reading. Children need to know what strategies they are learning. My students do use a range of strategies, but I rarely talk about them. I think this is something I need to develop. The book gave many examples of questioning I can do for this.

2) Further to the first point, children need to be more aware of what they are learning and why. I keep on thinking back to Tom's presentation last year about always discussing with his children: "What are we learning?" and "Why are we learning it?" Perhaps this is a good time to start doing the same thing. This also falls back to success criteria and making good judgements on things like thumb stickers. I've started focusing on judging against the actual WALT (handwriting has been helpful for this) lately and I have noticed some children are being honest about their learning, so this is a step in the right direction.

3) Children need to learn explicitly about text structure. I have focused a lot of time on actual decoding that perhaps this has fallen by the wayside. I need to start doing this with at least my top two groups as they are getting to levels where we frequently get a few different text structures.

Generally, I think the message is that we need to be talking more about how we read and what we're reading. Children need the skills to analyze their own work and know what they need to know next. These are all thinking skills and the more skills they have, the better learners they will be.