I wish I would have found this blog post while I was still teaching reading groups!! I loved the analogy in this lesson so much that I immediately pulled out my anchor chart and markers, and created a connections anchor chart that illustrated the point. Deep connections help us understand the story and infer the author's message. She compared the golf ball to the deep connections that we should make while reading. Then she dropped the golf ball into the water, and it immediately sank to the bottom of the glass. Surface connections do not help us understand the story any better- they just sit on the surface of the text. She compared this floating ball to the surface connections we make while reading. Obviously, it stayed afloat on the surface of the water.

She began the lesson by dropping the ping-pong ball into the glass of water. (The lesson can be traced back to Tanny McGregor's book called Comprehension Connections.) The lesson requires a glass of water, a ping-pong ball, and a golf ball. She shared a lesson she did with her students where she explained the difference between deep connections and surface connections. Then, one day, I ran across a blog post by Krista from The Second Grade Superkids. I would ask questions to pull a deeper connection out of each student, but it often felt like I was exerting a lot more effort than my students were putting forth. something like 'I can connect with Peter because we both have annoying little brothers', or ' Shiloh reminds me of A Dog's Life because both books are about a dog'. Much to my disappointment, however, more than half of my students would return to the next day's reading group with a very weak connection quickly scribbled on their sticky note. I had modeled writing strong connections several times, and I felt like students should know my expectations. From previous lessons, students already knew that they could choose between making a text-to-self connection, a text-to-text connection, or a text-to-world connection. Has it ever happened to you? When our reading group time was drawing to a close, I would announce the pages I expected my students to read on their own, hand each student a sticky note, and tell them their assignment was to read the assigned pages and record a connection they made while reading the pages. Here is a scene that replayed itself more often than I would like to admit when I was teaching reading.

Free story elements anchor chart