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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Response skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed.

Ask questions that will allow students to describe personal connections.

Sample questions:

  • What does this remind you of in your life?
  • How is this similar to your life? How is it different?
  • How does this relate to something that has happened to you or something you have learned?
  • How does this make you feel? Why?

Students can be asked to respond by doing the following:

  • Drawing or writing personal connections. Consider the relevancy of the connection(s) and the detail included in the writing or drawing about personal connections.
  • Orally articulating personal connections. Consider the relevancy of the connection(s) and the detail in the articulated response.
  • Completing a graphic organizer that shows a connection between a source and a personal experience. The graphic organizer can have written or illustrated responses. Consider the relevancy of the connection(s) and the detailed included in the writing or drawing.

Note:

  • By first grade, students should be able to elaborate on connections and make multiple connections to multiple sources.
  • Students should be assessed on the quality of their responses, not simply on the ability to make a connection.
When students explain personal connections they have made to something read, heard, or viewed, they are demonstrating how they have interpreted the explicit and implied ideas expressed. Personal connections are students' reactions to an idea and connections the readers make between themselves and the sources.
Sources are any communication medium. In first grade, this could include books, poems, digital texts, videos, illustrations, graphs, charts, email, websites, or interviews with people.