Framing Our Reading Part 1-Engagement

	Text Citation or Link	Rationale for Choosing	Text Frame(s)	Strategies Used and Resource
Engagement Example	Graphene: The Next Wonder Material?	This article considers the scientific possibilities that lie ahead for a future where Graphene is mastered for current inventions and future innovations. This provides students to real-world applications of STEM subjects like mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry.	Concept/definition  Compare/contrast	Making Connections (McLaughlin book)

Making Connections is a reading comprehension strategy that students can use by thinking about their prior knowledge to create connections between the text and themselves, the text to other related texts, and the text to the world. By making connections, students are able to see the crossover of different disciplines in school and can continue to do this throughout their education, effectively increasing their working knowledge by increasing their connections to different subjects and material. 

One way that students can create more connections is by using connection Stems. The idea behind these is that the teacher can give their students simple phrases that start off something similar to “That reminds me of…” or “I remember when…”. Students can then use these phrases in a classroom lesson after receiving instruction from the teacher to make connections to previous learning or experiences that are related to the topic being covered in class. After students have demonstrated some understanding of connections stems, I would then provoke them to consider the effect of these connections in different content areas. 

In my experience, making connections was always something that I have excelled at throughout my educational career. I was lucky enough as a child to travel all over the world and experience different things as well as have parents who work in very different disciplines from engineering to being involved in management roles and business communications. This background knowledge allowed me to make connections between subjects and the world around me. I believe that making connections sparked my interest in many different subjects to study and careers to consider pursuing. This reading strategy can motivate students into working towards future goals and give them a long term motivation for their future success. 

The lesson that I have in mind would use this article in class and have students read through this after mentioning the idea of making connections. After reading the article, I would help students work through a few examples of connection stems. After this, I would lead them into a reflection period where they can think about the implications of this article in different subjects like physics and chemistry as well as how mathematics plays an important role in this future technology. 

This reading strategy would be effective because while this article could be challenging for students because it is not directly mathematically based, the inventions that come from this technology are electronical in nature and that is where the mathematics takes over. This connection is very deep and may be difficult for students to see at first. Hopefully they can work together through the material to make this connection evident. One disadvantage of making connections is that it requires that a fair sample of students have background knowledge that can be related to the material in class. This limits the teacher to using material that is simple in nature unless the class displays strong background knowledge throughout the course.

References

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content area reading: Teaching and learning for college and career readiness (Second ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Tinnesand, M. (2012, August). Graphene: The Next Wonder Material? Retrieved April 09, 2016, from http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/archive-2012-2013/graphene.html?_ga=1.160284285.1958966576.1460250073