[COLTK432]

How do you get your children thinking about their thinking? My children are from low income homes. They lack language. I know that they can do this and I want them to make their learning their own. We've spent a lot of time building urgency and learning to be active learners rather than passive ones. I know my kids can do this but we are struggling. I've been and continue to model everyday. Any other suggestions?

[zola]

model...model...model

[angelajw]

I talk aloud to myself. Such as...I know this sentence starts with a question word so what will my end mark be? Or I am not sure how to spell Jacob and Carson but the word they will work in the sentence and I know the word they is on the word wall.

[Mrs.M1]

Be sure you pull it into math, as well, which is much more concrete. They may grasp it here first and then bring it into their reading and writing. I have cards with random dot configurations on them. We start the year with "Tell Me Fast". I show the kids a card and they tell me fast what they see on the card (numerically, speaking). I then follow up with, "How do you see that?" and they come up and point to show us how they see the number they got. It works really well and gives us a good jumpstart into addition and subtraction because the kids will say things like, "I see 5 dots here and 2 dots here, so that makes 7." Or "I almost see the set for 6, but one is missing, so I know it is 5".

The first week of school I used shape cards for this and they had to tell me how they knew what shape it was..."it has 4 sides, 4 corners and all of the sides are the same".

I carry this into our language arts time with words. I will frame a word in our poem or story and ask them how they know what it says. They come up and walk through how they solved the word using chunks or associations.

[teacherece]

I have a great resource for this topic. The book is entitled Mosaic of Thought. It is an amazing and worthwhile resource to teach any grade every comprehension skill in a concrete way. For thinking about thinking they have the idea called "Real Reading Salad" I made mine very literal. You can PM me if you want more details. It works great every time!