Helping your student understand Tracks of Thinking

So your child just brought home a clear bag filled with books, post-it notes, and a letter from their ever-zealous teacher declaring how important it is that they read and leave tracks of their thinking.

What?

This week, I introduced the children to the idea that good readers leave tracks of their thinking. For several days, I have modeled how I think as I read. I am constantly thinking. In fact, I told students, the most important thing about your reading is your THINKING about the text.

Here's a simple representation:

Think about a salad. Not a complicated salad, just a run of the mill lettuce-and-tomato deal. A big bowl full to overflowing with lettuce and tomatoes. Yum.

Now-- what is there more of in that typical bowl of salad. Lettuce? or tomatoes?

Generally the answer is lettuce.

When we think as we read, we do two major kinds of thinking.

Right There
Some of the thinking we do as we read is recalling or remembering. The information right there in what the text says or the pictures show us is important. But recalling or remembering is only a small part of really comprehending what we read. That's why our recalling and remembering are like the tomatoes of the salad-- they aren't a salad all alone, but a salad isn't a salad without them, either. (Whew! How's that for circular reasoning?) Right there thinking is important, but we also need connections, predictions, and inferences to really deepen our understanding to comprehension.

In Your Head
Those connections, predictions, and inferences you make as you read often take place In Your Head. You might never say them out loud at all, but that doesn't make them unimportant! Helping students become aware that they think as they read can be a tricky task. That's why we've taken the sticky notes in hand, in hopes of becoming more metacognitive learners-- thinking about our thinking!

If your child is having trouble identifying thinking in their head, and are stuck on telling what is happening just like the text says or the pictures show, you might point out that In Your Head thinking might sound like one of these things:

-- "I wonder if..."-- "Because.........., I think ................... will happen next..."
-- "Oh, I get it now...!"
-- "At first I thought................., but now I think....................... ."
-- "What would happen if...?"
-- "Why?"
-- "This is good because..."
-- "This is like the time that..."
-- "This reminds me of..."

Because thinking about thinking is tricky, it can be a slow process acquiring the skills to identify thinking as it's happening. Leaving tracks of your thinking is important to young readers as they learn to value their thoughts as the other critical element of comprehension.

It's unlikely, at first, that students will really be able to identify more "lettuce" than "tomato" in their thinking. That's okay. But feel free to ask your child, "Is that tomato-text or lettuce-thinking?" Encourage them to use the sticky notes to write down the thinking that is happening in their head, then attach it to the page where that thinking took place.

The Real World Connection
Very rarely do adults read text simply for the sake of recalling it later. Most often, we read to gain information that will help us make a decision or complete a process (like putting together new furniture or filing our taxes). Being able to read for information involves taking what we read and personalizing it for use ("Oh. I need to turn this board around before I screw it to the other one."; "My husband's email says we're out of milk. That means I need to buy more on the way home."). In order to do that, students need to get comfortable with the idea of actively engaging text, and learning what it means to dig in and understand.

Clearly, we are at the very early stages of this process with our young readers. Thank you so much for engaging with your child as he or she reads at home, and for supporting their learning with your time and energy resources! And thank you for supporting our class!