ANCHOR LESSONS AND ANCHOR CHARTS



ANCHOR LESSONS AND ANCHOR CHARTS

From Strategies That Work (Harvey & Goudvis) – pp. 11-12, 50-51

Anchor lessons are our most effective mini-lessons. For example, the teacher might talk about making personal connections using the book Up North at the Cabin. “This book reminds me exactly of my own childhood. It is the story of a young girl about your age who left the city every summer to spend time in a cabin on a lake in Minnesota. Minnesota is called the land of ten thousand lakes. I grew up in the neighboring state of Wisconsin. We had our share of lakes, too. Writers write best about things they know and care about. I was a kid who loved summer. Like the young girl in the book, I spent summers on a lake where we fished, swam, water-skied, hiked, and canoed. Have you ever read a book that reminds you of your own life?”

As the teacher reads aloud Up North at the Cabin, she models her thinking and uses sticky notes to jot down that thinking. She marks the sticky note with the code T-S for text-to-self connection because it reminds her in some way of her own life and prior experience. She places the sticky note on the appropriate passage or picture.

She reads the book page by page sharing her thinking about waterskiing, the local bait shop, pruney fingers from too much swimming, and portaging canoes. She codes sticky notes with T-S and writes “Sometimes we even used peanut butter for bait when we ran out of night crawlers” or “Boy, was I mad when my dad made me carry that canoe.”

When she finishes the book, she encourages the kids to find a book they connect with and to use sticky notes to mark their text-to-self connections and jot down their thinking.

The teacher brings the whole group together for sharing. They co-construct an anchor chart to record kids’ thinking about making connections. Anchor charts make both the teacher’s and the students’ thinking visible and concrete. The charts are saved and brought out to remind students of past teaching and learning and to help them connect to future teaching and learning. Anchor charts provide a record of instruction.

Teachers and students can make use of several different kids of anchor charts:

Strategy charts. Teacher records points she wants to teach as well as children’s comments, insights, questions, inferences, and connections. Kids know when, how, and why to use a strategy in their reading and can refer to the chart for support.

Content charts. Content matters. These anchor charts record the interesting and important information that readers discover when reading. Sometimes we record new learning, how our thinking has evolved and changed, or new information we have acquired during a content area study.

Genre charts. As kids read in a particular genre and discuss what they know about it, we capture their thoughts in writing. We might co-construct a chart about the features of nonfiction or the elements of fiction, which we post for all to see and remember.

Note: It can be cumbersome to create a full-fledged anchor chart in the middle of a mini-lesson. There is a difference between an anchor chart as we have described above and a lesson chart that we write quickly as we teach, capturing a bit of kids’ thinking and supporting them when they go off to practice. Later, to hold thinking over time, we can construct a more carefully composed and elaborate anchor chart that kids can refer to again and again for guidance.

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