An example of illustrations that might help us predict what a story is about.

Predicting: During my PSI in a grade four classroom I led read alongs for the students. Predicting what would happen next in a story was a great way for my to assess the students understanding while also keeping students engaged. We would predict what we think the story will be about just by looking at the title and front cover, but we would also predict throughout the story. I loved this strategy and hope to use it in my PSIII in an elementary classroom.

Figuring Out Unknown Words: Teaching grade four was an eyeopener as to certain words the students had trouble understanding. A strategy my T.A. used was asking the students to look the word up in the dictionary which gave them the ability to take their learning into their own hands. If I was doing a read aloud for the students I would purposefully stop on words I thought students might struggle with. We would then talk through the word as a class. By looking at the sentence we would come to conclusions about what meaning would make the most sense for the word. We then would check our prediction by reading the dictionaries definition. In the future, I would love to have a word wall for the students to use as reference. As new words arise we would add them to the wall.

Finding connections to everyday life could include extra curricular activities, pets, vacations, and family... just to name a few.

Making Connections: As it is mentioned in the text (p.33), students are more motivated to read when the readings are relevant to their lives. This is why it is important to make connections throughout a story. I can easily include this when I do future read alouds for my students. I can relate the reading to something we have already learned, or even relate it to another subject and make the lesson cross curricular. I can also ask students to share stories from their own lives either before or after the reading.