Reading Salad

This week we are focusing on building our reading stamina.  We discussed what stamina is and how the only way to increase our reading stamina is to practice reading.  We are able to increase our reading stamina by thinking metacognitively, or thinking about our thinking.  We aren't just going to read the words on the page (that's what fake readers do), we are going to read the text and then try to make connections to ourselves or our previous experiences.  I gave the students the stems below.

Next, we talked about how being a good reader is like making a salad.  The students told me the most important ingredient of a salad is the lettuce.  We decided that the most important thing about reading is the text.  With out the text, you have nothing.  We made one bowl and labeled it "Text" and put oru lettuce inside.

Next, we determined that a salad is rather bland if you just eat lettuce.  The toppings and dressings are what make a salad delicious.  Just like how reading is boring when you just read the words.  When you think about the text and make connections as you read, then a story comes alive.  We then remember what we read, get excited about our text, and have more success as readers.  We took a second bowl and labeled it "Thinking" and added our croutons, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, and ranch dressing.   

We then practiced being real readers with one of my favorite stories, Dogzilla by Dav Pilkey.  We stopped as we read and made connections to our background knowledge about dogs, our own dogs, and the perspective of our characters to make predictions about the text and better understand what our author was trying to tell us.  When we stopped we used the sentence stem "I text told me...." and then added a lettuce leaf to our salad bowl.  We then followed it up with a sentence stem from our metacognition chart that challenged us to interact with the text and thus become real readers.

As you can see, we created a well balanced salad full of lettuce and all of the toppings.  We will continue to practice our real reading skills over the next several weeks which in turn should help us increase our reading stamina and comprehension.