Comprehension » Primary Analogies

Primary Analogies
by Ridgewood, NJ, Public Schools, Gae Brunner, Jean Schoenlank, Marianne Williams, Terri Wiss
Grades K–3

Primary Analogies, Books 1, 2, and 3, introduces young students to sophisticated thinking skills as they learn to read. To introduce the idea of solving analogies, a pre-analogy section gives practice in finding similarities, categorizing, making comparisons, and using Venn diagrams.

Exercises continue with picture-to-picture analogies. Two pictures that have a special relationship are connected by a line in a frame containing six pictures. Students choose two other pictures from the frame that have the same relationship and connect them with a line. As students begin to learn the letters of the alphabet, the analogies include them, combining letters and pictures or symbols, and progressing to analogies using only words—easy, phonetically regular words as well as words students meet in their reading and in their daily lives. In the culminating All-Star Level, students make up their own analogies, choosing from labeled pictures in a box and telling, in writing, how the pictures go together.

Primary Analogies groups analogous relationships into 5 categories: descriptive, comparative, categorical, serial, and causal, with 3 levels of difficulty within each category.

As they solve and create analogies, students actively process information, make important connections, use information and skills to identify relationships, construct relationships and generate new knowledge, and improve understanding and long-term memory.

Analogies have been used successfully in first through eighth grade in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, public schools for more than 12 years. Although analogous thinking is already done in informal ways in many primary classrooms, the materials in Primary Analogies transform that thinking into a focused and systematic program.