Making Connections

Text to self, text to text, text to world

A moment from the book in the top box, a moment from your own life underneath, and then the only question that matters: what is actually the same? Done well it deepens comprehension. Done badly it is thirty children telling you about their holidays.

The comparison is the work. The connection itself is the easy half; saying what is alike is the hard half.

It gives quiet children a way in. Everyone has a life to connect to, even if they found the text difficult.

Self, another book, or the world. Each connection says which kind it is. The sheet prints two worked examples, then three blank ones.

Model a connection on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free to try

The sheet it prints

The printable making connections sheet - two worked examples, then three rows of a moment in the book, what it connects to, and what is the same.

What are text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections?

They are three kinds of link a reader makes while reading. A text-to-self connection links the book to something in your own life. A text-to-text connection links it to another book, film or story you know. A text-to-world connection links it to something happening outside your life - history, news, how people behave generally.

The three-way framing became widespread in primary classrooms through the comprehension-strategy work of the 1990s, particularly Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann's Mosaic of Thought (1997), which popularised teaching these strategies explicitly rather than assuming good readers pick them up.

Why does making connections help comprehension?

Because comprehension is mostly a background-knowledge problem. When a reader has something to attach a new event to, they hold onto it, predict from it and infer around it. When they have nothing, the words go past correctly decoded and completely unabsorbed. A connection is a child manufacturing the missing attachment point on purpose.

The catch is that this only works if the connection is relevant. An irrelevant connection does not just fail to help - it actively pulls attention away from the text, which is why the next section is the most important one on this page.

How do you stop children making shallow connections?

This is the reason making connections has a poor reputation, and it is entirely fixable. The shallow version sounds like: "This is about a dog. I have a dog." True, useless, and it takes the discussion straight out of the book.

Three things fix it, in order of how much they help:

Connect to how it felt, not to what happened. Change the question from "what does this remind you of?" to "when have you felt like that?" That single rewording removes most of the noise, because feelings connect where objects do not.
Make them finish the sentence. A connection is not done until they have said "… and what is the same is …" Most shallow connections cannot survive that clause, and the child works that out themselves.
Ask what is different too. This is the step that turns it back into reading. Naming the difference forces them to look again at what the text actually says, which is precisely where a wandering connection was taking them away from.

From the classroom

I used to model with a tidy, moving connection of my own and get thirty tidy, moving connections back that were mostly invented. What works better is modelling a deliberately imperfect one - a small, slightly boring memory where the match is genuinely partial, and then saying out loud which bits do not fit. Children mirror the standard you demonstrate, not the standard you describe, and a real half-match gives them permission to be honest.

How do you teach making connections?

Read the passage first with no task attached, model one of your own including the part that does not match, pin down the precise moment from the book together, then have everyone write their own connection privately before anybody shares.

Read the passage first, with no task. Connections made while hunting for connections are always worse.
Model one of yours, including the part that does not match.
Fill the top box together - the moment from the book. Getting this precise is half the battle; "the bit where he is sad" is not a moment.
Everyone writes their own bottom box, privately, before anyone shares.
Talk in pairs about same and different, then take two or three to the class.

Sentence stems that actually work

Five stems that make a connection do some work. Each one forces a difference, a reason or a prediction rather than just a resemblance:

When … happened, it reminded me of the time I …
I know how … feels here, because …
What is the same is …, but what is different is …
This is like … except that …
Because I have …, I think … is going to …

The last one is worth pointing out to children explicitly: it is a connection being used to predict, which is the point of the whole strategy.

How do you make it harder or easier?

Children who are new to it need the moment from the book chosen for them - give them the box already filled in and let them supply only the second half. Once they can find their own moment, the what is different step should start carrying as much weight as the connection itself. One sensitivity worth holding on to whoever you are teaching: text-to-self invites children to share real life, so keep the sharing voluntary and let anyone who prefers it make a text-to-text connection instead.

Try it now

Model one connection of your own on the board first - a real one, with the boring bits left in. Children copy the depth of the example you give them far more closely than the instructions you give them.