Metacognition

Today we tried out a new recipe in class...

...a Reading Salad!

Today we had a lot of fun talking about metacognition - a big fancy word for thinking about thinking.  We read the book, Don't Laugh at Me, by Steve Seskin and added bits of "lettuce" and "tomato" to our salad as I read aloud.  The lettuce bits represented thinking and the tomato represented the actual reading of the text.  As the students and I both added pieces of lettuce as we thought about what we read, it soon became quite clear that our salad had more thinking and lettuce in it!  Reading can't just be decoding and reading the words.  Our salad demonstrated that THINKING has to be involved!  Otherwise reading is meaningless.                                                                                After we finished the book we worked on the poster to the right because sometimes you just need a visual aide to trigger your learning!  The kids did a great job understanding that reading is a marriage of the text and thinking.  Real reading happens when you think about and reflect on the words on the page. I am anxious to see the students try out their own reading salad as we continue to read throughout the year!