Boars and Baseball: Making Connections

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

How does the story connect to your own life, another text you have read, or the world around you? In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. After reading the novel, the instructor introduces and models the strategy of making connections.  After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.

This lesson uses In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson as an example, but this activity is effective with any work of literature in which connections are important.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

• Double-Entry Journal: This handout helps students record ideas and situations from texts in one column, and their reactions in the second, thus making a connection between the text and themselves, another text, or the world.
• Connection Web: Students can use this printout to record details about the text connections they have made and use those details in their own projects.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

"We routinely tell students that good readers ‘make connections,' but we tend to assume they know how; the truth is that only a few do, a couple more figure it out on their own, and the rest don't even know what we mean, let alone how to make them."

In this lesson, the instructor models how students can make three different kinds of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world).  Students then use this knowledge to find their own personal connections to the text and plan and present a project based on a personal connection of their choice.

Further Reading

Burke, Jim.  "TEACHER'S TOOLBOX: Making Connections."  Voices from the Middle 13: 3, 38-39.  Print.

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