Turning Our Predictions/Connections into Interview Questions

I believe that students deepen their learning through social interaction. We have been reading, I Am Malala as a read aloud. During the last few weeks, we have been making connections, predictions, and identifying unknown vocabulary.

This week, my students wrote connections, predictions, and identified unknown vocabulary for pages, 11-21, in I Am Malala. They then turned a connection and a prediction into two interview questions. We looked at the Making Stories with Jeff Kinney book. It is a biography in interview format. This is a great way to connect books. It is also a great resource for how to ask well-informed interview questions. Plus, all of my students love his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. (My students also noticed that in biographies and autobiographies, the author starts from childhood and then writes in a sequence, or time (chronological order) of the person's life. I LOVE AHA! MOMENTS!!

My students sent me their connections and predictions through Google classroom. I was able to provide them feedback for their questions. They used their questions to interview a friend, then created videos for their online portfolios. I have shared the process, and some of their pictures and videos below. Enjoy :)

"I AM Malala"

We are currently practicing making connections to text and making predictions. We are using our read-aloud book, "I Am Malala," to connect to Malala's experiences as a girl wanting to go to school in Pakistan. We are examining our experiences and rights as students in the United States. I am excited to dive deeper into the story. It is my hope that my students will see that even though Malala lived a vastly different lifestyle in the Middle East, we all want the right to an education. Malala does the same things as any 15-year-old girl in the United States - like gossip and study for exams. But, she also overcomes many hurdles to fight for the rights of girls to go to school. This story also lends itself to other reading strategies like compare/contrast. As I write this post, more and more ideas come to mind. This is what excites me about reading - and teaching reading! The possibilities!!!

The students are currently journaling their connections and predictions, and checking their predictions, as we read. I am eagerly anticipating the next post, where my students create discussion videos in their online portfolios. 

Making Connections to Text

This week we focused on making connections to text to deepen our understanding of the story. My students used their reading books and a graphic organizer to make 3 connections: text-to-text, text-to -self, and text-to-world. I started by modeling a text-to-world connection using our read aloud book, I Am Malala. Then, I modeled writing a paragraph about the connection using my previous example. The students used my models and their online portfolios to type their connections. They were responsible for making all three types of connections.