Building Mathematical Comprehension - Chapter #1

If you have been reading my blog for awhile you will know that I fell in LOVE with Guided Math last summer while reading Laney Sammons book on the topic.  With the help of some AMAZING teacher blogger friends I was able to delve deeply into the concept and present it to my grade 1 team as a "HOLY MOLY WE HAVE TO DO THIS".  Sure enough they were crazy enough to believe in me and in Guided Math and we did it - and got some AMAZING and IRREFUTABLE evidence of our success.

Now we have a year under our belt and of course I want to learn more.  I was torn between two different Laney Sammons titles for this summer, but ended up deciding on Building Mathematical Comprehension.  

And this week with some help from my teacher friends we will embark on a journey to read and internalize the idea that reading and math are more connected than we (or at least I) thought!  Join in and share your thoughts!!

As a first grade teacher I am able to teach reading strategies with relative ease. It is something that I do day in and day out year in and year out.  However, I never really gave it a lot of thought when it came to math.  This chapter got me thinking about how students need to use many of the same strategies when comprehending in reading as they do when having to understanding in math.  What worried me was when Sammons wrote about how we use different language to describe the strategies in math and reading.  And while I am not sure I use different language, I am sure that I am not explicit about my teaching of math comprehension strategies!  This clearly needs to change!

I also liked how the book broke up some of the comprehension strategies that I teach and placed them into categories 
-  "beginning" (though I usually think of this as before)
     -  monitoring meaning
     -  making connections
     -  making inferences
     -  asking questions
 -  "during"
     -  making connections
     -  asking questions
     -  visualizing
     -  making inferences
     -  determining importance
     -  synthesizing
     -  monitoring meaning
-  "after"
     -  making connections
     -  determining importance
     -  synthesizing 
     -  monitoring meaning

I am excited to read chapter 2 for next Tuesday - all about math vocabulary!  Join us and read what my bloggy buddies have to say!!

An InLinkz Link-up