I’m pretty sure that everyone has a Nana in their life because Nana is the person who can tell a story about anything because she has lived it all and if she hasn’t she has a way to connect what you are talking about to something she has lived. Nana can take your story about a blueberry pie at the fundraiser you went to and turn it into an entire story about travelling through the Northeast during the fall where she also had the opportunity to go crab fishing or maybe instead she ties it to the sheet fundraiser that she did before she went on a mission trip to Haiti when she was 80. Did you know that the teenagers who were also on the trip came to her for their secret snacks?
Either way Nana chooses travel down memory lane, her story will go on for thirty minutes or more depending on how many of her stories she can tie together. She may even talk away hours if you don’t jump in. Nana isn’t trying to monopolize your time or even make the day about her; in fact, she would be just as happy listening and sharing wisdom sporadically. What Nana is trying to do is pull the random things in life together. She is weaving a full life where nothing happens in a vacuum and everything is related to your present because we are a combination of all our experiences.
We all need to take a lesson from Nana. Maybe not in the way she can occupy the Amazon delivery guy for 20 minutes with stories but rather in the way she uses her past experiences to inform and enrich her present. This is never more true than when we are reading. You see connecting our own lives, bits of other stories and world events to what we are currently reading brings new depth to our understanding of the text. It makes the words grander and lends more feeling.
In true Nana style it’s time for a story to help this all make sense. Last night I was finishing Between Sisters by Kristin Hannah. I often find her books to be very compelling and can usually pull in some of my weird history knowledge to fill out the story. These connections and her writing style always keep me turning the pages. It was no different for this book. But this book turned out differently. You see out of no where – okay not really but it did blindside me at the time but looking back I can see the set up – one of the characters gets a devastating medical diagnosis. Immediately my heart was breaking. Did I like the character? I sure did but that wasn’t the cause of my reaction. No my reaction came from the fact that I’ve been there and I’ve had to figure out how to tell my own children that I may not be okay. I’ve had to wrestle with who to share my diagnosis with and who to hide it from until we knew more. The character was living my past reality. And while I would have enjoyed this book three years ago, I would not have had the same rich connected experience reading it as I do today.
Our experiences shape who we are. They change our perspective. They lead to seeing with new eyes. Why would we ever want to set all of that aside while we are reading? When instead, we can bring it along and allow it to shape how we think about what we are reading. Thoughtful readers make the connections. They look for ways the text ties back to their own lives, the experiences of a character in another story or even to world events or history.
Making connections is not just story time. Making connections is about explaining why what you know through experience or learning changes your current view on the text. This is why the sentence starter that is taught with connection is “That reminds me of ____________________ so ______________________.” The story related to what this part of a book reminds you of itself matters but what matters far more is the so statement at the end. It is the recognition that your perspective is shaped by something and therefore is your unique perspective. The so statement allows us to realize that not everyone sees things the same way we see them because our experiences are different, we know different things, we connect uniquely.
Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to dig into how to make connections and how to allow them to inform us as thoughtful readers. I’ll be sharing tips and tricks for making strong connections as well as sharing some of our favorite read aloud books for makin connections. Unfortunately, if you don’t follow us on social media – Facebook, Instagram and Threads – or join our email list, you’ll miss out on all the best content about how to raise or be a thoughtful reader. See you out there and remember, keep it smart, keep it simple.
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