Teaching Comprehension Strategies: Making Connections

There are hundreds of lists on the web of Mentor texts for comprehension strategies.  However, most of the books on the lists are fiction.  I have always read fiction books to teach the strategies.  But as I am writing this through my Informational Text class lens, I can see how the strategies work in nonfiction as well as fiction.

For making connections I usually teach three separate lessons. My first lesson for making Text-to-self connections is done using, Oliver Button is a Sissy by Tomie dePaola (Debbie Miller pick) about feeling different and being bullied. This is because every kid can make a text-to-self connection to those feelings.  When I was teaching third grade, I read The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, which is a chapter book with the same theme of not fitting in.  I have also read The Pigeon Wants a Puppy by Mo Willems because kids understand wanting a pet and being told no and they also understand getting what you think you want and then realizing you don't really want it.  So as I started thinking about nonfiction selections,  I think that reading Tomie dePaola's biography off his website after reading Oliver Button is a Sissy could lead well into text -to- text connections because Oliver Button was written from events in DePaol's life.  So you can also discuss how writers get their ideas.
Or perhaps another option would be All About Cats and Kittens by Emily Neye where they can tell you about all their pet stores.

Whenever I teach text-to-text connections I usually do teach fiction and nonfiction book on the same topic together like Frogs by Nic Bishop with Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel.  Another option I sometimes utilize is using one of the Magic Tree House books with its Nonfiction matching book.

The easiest connection to use a nonfiction book with is text-to-world.  I like to use something that is going on at the time I teach it, so a recent newspaper article, or back when I had Scholastic News we would make text-to-world connections.  My third graders favorite text-to-world story was "Here's My Dollar" by Gary Soto but I can only find the story in textbooks.  It is about a 9year old girl that hears that the Fresno zoo is running out of money so she wrote a letter to the paper asking everyone to send a dollar to the zoo.  Her campaign ended up raised $600,000 in six months.  This year would be the perfect time to read a book about the Olympics.