Building Strong Learners

Readers formulate questions when they wonder about the story before, during and after reading it. When talking to students about questioning it is important to emphasize that:

1. Asking and answering questions helps the reader to understand the text.
2. Some questions are easy to answer because the information is in the text.
3. Some questions require a lot of thinking because the answer is not in the book. These questions often do not have one right answer, make the reader think outside of the story and often create more questions for the reader.
4. Some useful questions words are: who, what, where, when, why, how, would, is, should, if, did, do are, does, doesn't, can't and couldn't.

Readers connect to a story when something in that story evokes a memory. When talking to students about making connections it is important to emphasize that:

1. A reader makes a connection to a story when a memory surfaces.
2. Readers can make connections to many aspects of a book: the pictures, the characters, the events, and even the emotions expressed in the story.
3. There are several types of connections that a reader can make:

• - connections between the book and the reader's own life
• - connections between the book and other reading material the reader has encountered
• - connections between the book and events in the reader's world

Readers infer when they take what they know about a story and then fill in the information that was not included. When talking to students about inferring it is important to emphasize that:

1. Inferring helps the reader to better understand the story.
2. Readers need to look for clues in the pictures and the text as well as relying on their own background knowledge to fill in what is not written on the page.
3. Some authors deliberately write very little but leave the reader lots of clues to think about.

Readers predict when they use their prior knowledge, as well as all of the information that they have gathered from the text and illustrations, to come up with a guess about what the story will be about.When talking to students about predicting it is important to emphasize that:

1. There is no right or wrong answer.
2. There are many clues in the text and in the pictures.
3. Their prediction might stay the same, or it might change, when new information is added to their prior knowledge.
4. Predicting is something that good readers do before they start reading a story.
5. Readers continue to predict while they are engaged in reading a story.

Readers are transformed by what they read when they make a shift in their own thinking.When talking to students about transforming (synthesis) it is important to emphasize that:

1. Transforming means that they change the way they think about themselves and the world around them.
2. Transforming may not take place right away. The ideas, facts, questions and inferences that surface while reading the story may be stored away in their memories for a long time.

Readers visualize when they make images in their heads from the text that they are reading or that is being read to them.When talking to students about visualizing it is important to emphasize that:

1. Visualizing is easy to do.
2. Visualizing and connecting are very similar. The images that you create in your mind come from connecting the author's words to your memories.
3. There are many colourful words that help you create pictures (rainbows, etc.)