📘 How a story can bump into your life

What you’ll learn

1. That happened to meHear that a connection is a true link between one piece of a story and something in your own life, and that not every page is about you.Year 1 asks you to link stories to your own experiences. Text-to-self is the classroom name. The book stays the book.
2. Same feelingUse feeling-words and Author-and-You questions to match a character's feeling to a feeling you have actually had.Grade 1 wants words that suggest feelings. QAR mixes the page with your life. A story hour has been doing this for a century.
3. Same job, different houseConnect to events and settings you know — a lost tooth, a swing, a chair, a building job — and sort true bumps from stretches.RL.1.3 and traditional tales give you pieces to match. A stretch only names a thing. A bump names a job or a feeling.
4. Say the connectionStop at the ping and say an I-sentence with one real detail, after a grown-up has modelled the shape.IES wants the idea related to experience out loud. Year 1 wants turns. A teddy is not enough until you add the job.
5. Then keep readingUse the connection to understand, predict, and talk, then finish the page — including stories that never bump.Prior knowledge builds meaning and feeds a guess. Tonight, say one bump. Then ask whether a stranger-story is still worth keeping.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• UK Department for Education, National curriculum in England: English programmes of study — Year 1 Reading comprehension: being encouraged to link what they read or hear read to their own experiences; drawing on what they already know or on background information and vocabulary provided by the teacher; discussing the significance of the title and events; making inferences on the basis of what is being said and done; predicting what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far; participate in discussion about what is read to them, taking turns and listening to what others say; explain clearly their understanding; becoming very familiar with key stories, fairy stories and traditional tales, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study
• Common Core State Standards Initiative, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.3 and RL.1.3 — identify or describe characters, settings, and major events in a story; RL.1.4 identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses; RL.K.9 / RL.1.9 compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in stories; RL.1.1 ask and answer questions about key details in a text, https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/1/ and https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/K/
• Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade: A Practice Guide (NCEE 2010-4038). Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. Recommendation 1 — teach reading comprehension strategies (strong evidence; panel identified 10 studies); Table 3 Activating Prior Knowledge/Predicting: students think about what they already know and use that knowledge with other clues to construct meaning, and hypothesise what will happen next; classroom activity: pull out a main idea and ask a question that relates the idea to their experience, https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 and https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/PracticeGuide/readingcomp_pg_092810.pdf
• Adler, C. R. (Ed.). 2001. Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read, pp. 49–54, National Institute for Literacy; presented on Reading Rockets as Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension — questions help students relate what they have learned to what they already know; Question-Answer Relationship: Right There, Think and Search, Author and You (text plus prior knowledge), On Your Own (prior knowledge and experiences); Frog and Toad examples, https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/comprehension/articles/seven-strategies-teach-students-text-comprehension
• Florida Center for Reading Research, Kindergarten and First Grade Student Center Activities, Comprehension — Picture the Character (C.007); Character Compare (C.008); Story Grammar (C.012); K-W-L (C.023); Make-and-Check-A-Prediction (C.024), https://fcrr.org/student-center-activities/kindergarten-and-first-grade
• Reading Rockets, Revisiting Read Alouds: Instructional Strategies that Encourage Students' Engagement with Text — three types of connections; text-to-self taught first (a personal experience, prior knowledge, or understanding), then text-to-text, then text-to-world, https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/comprehension/articles/revisiting-read-alouds-instructional-strategies-encourage-students

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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