Welcome to mrslykowski.com, Mrs. Lykowski's classroom website!  You can learn more about our classroom by using the links to the left. Visit our site often as it will be updated often.   Thanks for visiting our site!

 

I know a lot of parents have been asking me what is this 'metacognition' or 'schema' my child has been talking about. Below you will find information about my reading strategy lessons and the anchor charts my students help me create during our lesson. Most of the ideas you will see come from an awesome book called, Comprehension Connections:Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor. (I highly recommend it!)

Metacognition

When you do 'real reading' you will discover that there is a lot of thinking that takes places. Students discovered through using concrete objects such as 'the reading salad' that there should be more thinking than reading of words. Metacognition is "Thinking about your thinking."

 

Schema

Schema is everything you've ever seen, tasted, smelled, felt, or heard. It's your feelings, experiences, thoughts, and opinions.

We can use our schema on a particular topic to help us make connections to what we are reading. This in turn, helps us understand what we are reading!

Students found during our concrete exercise that they had schema about different Norman Rockwell pictures. They wrote their schema down on post-it notes and then shared their connections to the class. The elaborated stories were fantastic!

The different ways we can make connections between what we read and what we've experienced.

 

Inference (Making predictions using evidence and schema)

This week we worked on making inferences (or predictions) based on our schema (back-ground knowledge) and evidence. We first started this lesson with a bag of 'garbage' and a well-woven story. We looked at each piece of 'garbage' and made inferences about the type of people that may have used the item.

Then we moved onto making inferences about an old. well-worn house slipper and its owner. Below you will find the anchor charts that the students helped create during our lessons.