• meta
    meta  
     
    METACOGNITION is thinking about your own thinking.  
     
    ~Concrete Experience: The Reading Salad 
       The students learn the importance of thinking while reading through seeing a reading salad being made.  As they are listening to a story red text cards (representing tomatoes) and green thinking cards (representing lettuce) are being added to the reading salad bowl.  At the end of the story, the kids notice that more thinking is occurring (more green thinking cards were added) than text is being read.  Just like a real salad there is more lettuce than tomatoes.    
     
    ~Sensory Experience: When Brains and Books Collide
       The students are introduced to a graphic representation of metacognition, one that will reinforce what they have experienced.  The Venn diagram used to support instruction about metacognition overlaps a book shape with a head shape, illustrating the intersection of text and thinking.   
     
    ~Wordless Books: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Thoughts
        To continue to reinforce the reading strategy metacognition, the students are partnered up with another student and given a wordless picture book.  Wordless picture books enable students to be aware of their own thinking because no text is present to get in their way.  Below are the "thinking stems" to go along with metacognition to help support their dialogue as they practice "thinking about their thinking."
     
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