I've been Thinking about my thinking! Freebies! ***UPDATED***

This week I began instruction in reading comprehension with my 6th graders. After seeing Holly's post last year about Schema, (you should head over to her blog Crisscross Applesauce in First Grade and read it, there's a freebie!!!) I had to have this book...........

and I absolutely love it!! (Click on the picture to go to Amazon and get the book for yourself, it is so worth the $20). When working with students who have disabilities and I have found the abstracts of reading the most difficult to teach. I can show you how to sound out a word, stretch it, build it, write it, and memorize a meaning. But how do you teach someone to think??? This book provides great ideas and activities for giving kids real tactile ways to think about their thinking! Yeah we even learned the big ol word for that. This week I introduced them to the concept of meta-cognition, it went so well!!

I was so impressed with them and loved the activities we did. Here you can see our anchor chart with thinking stems,

I drew this one (don't look to closely I am no artist as some of them pointed out by asking what the big thing sticking out of the bottom of the face was..haha), and then copied the one from the book that each student filled in and placed in their reading notebooks.


We used speech bubbles I laminated so we could write on them with dry erase markers and wipe them off....

to record our thinking about our guided reading books! The kids did an awesome job of recording what they were thinking throughout the lesson. We talked a lot about deepening our thinking, not just noticing surface facts but really thinking about what the story is about and what is going on. 

and now for the freebies....... first here's the speech bubbles you can print and laminate then use over and over again!

And these are the labels for our graphic organizer we are using to keep track of all our comprehension strategies! I'm sure you've heard of Dinah Zikes big book of books and foldables! Well we just made an 8 tab flip book and put these labels on them. Meta-cognition goes on top and overshadows all of them, it's the umbrella of thinking that involves using all the other strategies!

***UPDATE*** Here is a look at the finished flip book!

 I used 5 sheets of white paper, folded over each other, glued the headings on in the order that I will be teaching them, under each flap we will write about the strategy as you can see below! (Hope this helps)

 

I hope you get what this should look like, I will post pictures once I have it all together! I have so much more I want to share this weekend so stay tuned! Hope you all have a great holiday weekend!