Strategies

Term 1: Making Connections

"When children understand how to connect the text they read to their lives, they begin to make connections between what they read and the larger world. This nudges them into thinking about bigger, more expansive issues beyond their universe of home, school and neighbourhood."

Making connections is when you make links or associations between what you read and your prior knowledge. There are three kinds of connections you can make when they read:

• Text to self - this is when you relate what you read to your own personal experiences, e.g. "This reminds me of when we moved to a new house....."
• Text to text - this is when the text you are reading reminds you of something else you have read, e.g. "I remember when this happened to a character in a story I read last week....."
• Text to world - This is when something you read reminds you of something you have seen or heard of happening in the world, e.g. "I saw this on a movie..... or I think this happened in another country, I saw it on the news....."

You can try to find these connections whenever you are reading to help you to understand. Sometimes you might not be able to find a connection, that's O.K. too.

Language we use when making connections:

These sentence starters might help you to think carefully about your reading;

Text to self

• That part reminds me of
• I remember when
• That makes me think about the time when
• I felt like ________________ (character) when
• I had a similar experience
• I think I would have felt differently because
• I know a person like this character
• That part is similar to my life because
• This is different to my life because

Text to text

• I read another book like this one
• This reminds me of another book I read
• A character who is like ________ is __________ from the book _______
• I have already read about this in _________

Text to world

• I know that happens in the real world because
• Similar things happen in the real world, like when
• This is different from things that happen in the real world because
• I saw a TV programme/movie about this topic
• I read book/article about this