Monday, September 27, 2010

Great Day Today...to be back at work!

We had a blast reading with our buddies in Kindergarten. It was a perfect way to solidify our learning...teach others. It was classic seeing them become teachers in their own sense and style. Have your older child buddy read with your younger. Both benefit from it...your older in fluency and your younger in fluency, accuracy, and comprehension by the good modeling.

Today too, we talked about activating prior knowlege and experience -- SCHEMA -- to apply to our new text. We talked about text relating to self, our own experience...and text to text, when another piece of literature relates in someway to the new material...and text to world, how a text connects to something we have heard in our greater world - maybe not our experience exactly, but something we know secondhand.

We talked about how our brains are like spiderwebs with millions of connections...the more connections we make with something, the stronger the bond (the learning). I also pointed out that our brains do this automatically, but we need to actively THINK (metacognate) about the connection to make it go into long term memory. That's when it helps...later on, when we come across something else that relates, boom, it's that easy to process.

We are going to continue this and then go into how that can help us figure out unknown words (a little bit of root word work). 

How do you connect with today's blog?

2 comments:

  1. Jewellyn, Glad to know you're back at work and doing what you do well! Teaching our kids! It's exciting to read your posts but particularly this one based on how we connect our brains to something that helps us keep it into long-term memory. My husband was helping our daughters yesterday with their weekly spelling test and asked them to give him a spelling test that they would have to grade. They did and graded him using the 'teacher' based grading by correctng his writing and spelling. It was awesome to find another way that they can connect with and get excited about...they were the big buddies this time!

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