Metacognition with Reading Salad

Have you seen this fabulous book?  (Click the picture to see it on Amazon!)

Wow!  What a treasure trove of fabulous ideas to make comprehension more concrete for children.  Today we made "Reading Salad."  I know you've seen this on other blogs or Pinterest, but basically you make Lettuce cards "Text" and tomato cards "Thinking" to demonstrate how reading is a mixture of text AND thinking.

I started by reading the title/cover of a book.  We put in one piece of "Lettuce" to represent the text I just read.  Then I demonstrated my thinking as I read by thinking aloud.
"Hmm....I wonder if this book will...  I'm noticing that....   I figure that...."  After I thought about the page, we put in a "tomato" to demonstrate my thinking.
I progressed throughout the book, page by page, demonstrating me first reading text and then thinking aloud about the text by making predictions, drawing conclusions, make text connections, etc.  By the time I was finished with the book we had a reading salad that looked like this:

We discussed the process and concluded that REAL READING is TEXT + THINKING.  The kids got it...they really did!

The next step was much harder for first graders, but I imagine would go much more smoothly for second grade and up.  I had students read a couple of pages from a book and then explain their thinking aloud while a classmate held up a thought bubble.

This exercise came straight from the Comprehension Connections book (though I'm not sure if the author is the original source or not).  I've created a little freebie pack to help you carry out this activity in your own classroom.  It includes the materials pictured above plus a few other goodies...

If you can use these goodies, you can download them by clicking below: