Making connections is always an important task for teachers. Science teachers are encouraged to connect new learning with students' prior knowledge, learning with student interests, learning with cultural experiences, and classroom activities across academic disciplines. Strategies that facilitate these connections help teachers enrich and enhance instruction. The authors have found two strategies--connections charts and book talk groups--to be excellent ways to guide teachers in using trade books and other narrative informational literature to support student learning in science. After introducing the two methods, the authors describe their experiences with implementing the methods in a fifth-grade classroom. (Contains 2 figures.)