Big Ideas

Chapter 10, Determining Importance in Text gives strategies in helpings students determine what important information in a text is. This can be difficult for many students. They may have different ideas and opinions on what are the main points of a text or what is the thing that the reader needs to know. As a teacher it is important to model the different strategies such as scanning the text before you read, rereading the text and pointing out important words and key facts. I believe that a very important strategy that helps students learn is to build upon their prior knowledge. It is taking what they already know and adding new information to it. It is making them think in a different way while using their background knowledge.

Chapter 11, Summarizing and Synthesizing showed the differences in summarizing and synthesizing. Both are comprehension skills that children need to obtain to engage in a text. Summarizing is pulling the most important information out of a text. This helps the reader to gain the knowledge of the most important information they are reading. This engages the students to differentiate between important aspects of the texts and smaller details that are not as important to have the basic understanding of the text. It is sometimes difficult for students to know what is a main point and what is not. This comes from practice of summarizing texts. Synthesizing is one step further by combing ideas. The reader stops and thinks about what they are reading. They extend literal meaning to inferential level. This is a higher level of thinking.The student puts together new information to existing information to help comprehend the texts. Synthesizing is making connections to prior knowledge. It builds and enhances learning by thinking in a new way. Both summarizing and synthesizing use information to bring information together. Both are important comprehension skills that students should obtain.

Big Ideas

In chapter 10 of Strategies That Work, the big idea is how to help student process, sort, and comprehend the information in informational texts. It is important as teachers, that we provided the tools and models for students so they determine the important aspects in a text, rather than trying to remember and decipher every word. When teaching these skills it is essential that they are authentic and meaningful to student’s lives, which can be demonstrated in magazines, books, articles, etc.  In the lesson, “Becoming Familiar with the Characteristics of Nonfiction Trade Books,” the teacher had her students to explore a topic of their choice and use facts they learned to design their own trade book page. This encouraged student to observe and notice elements of nonfiction texts.

In chapter 12, the big idea was how to select and implement texts across all subject areas. It is important that these texts are related to the real world and bring up issues that are important. The books need to be comprehensible and relatable to the area of study.  My favorite lesson from this section was, “Create Journals and Personal Narratives to Understand Historical Perspective,” the students read narratives and journals of individuals in certain time periods and then create their very own journal from their point of view. This would really help students reflect on the time period and the feelings/actions/impact of that individual! 

       

        The big idea of Chapter 10 was how we as teachers, can help readers sort through the information in an informational text. When reading nonfiction, students have to determine what information is important by using various strategies such as over viewing (similar to skimming/scanning). 

        Teaching students to determine importance is an essential skill that students have to be able to do. We can develop this strategy authentically in the classroom by using meaningful literature such as a current newspaper, magazine or even a popular non-fiction book. In "Building Background Knowledge of Nonfiction Features," the teacher took a picture from home of her cat and labeled in "caption" and  included a caption of her picture. Each of her students brought in their own pictures from home and did the same thing. Then as they were coming across unfamiliar elements in nonfiction, students add that element into their own book. I love this idea because students get to use meaningful materials (their own pictures) and build their own nonfiction book from exploring nonfiction literature. 

       Chapter 11's big idea was that we summarize information while we read and pull out the most important information and put it in our own words to help remember it. But in order to do this, we need to connect it to our current background knowledge and stop and actively think about the information in order to help readers stay on track with the text and check their own understanding. When kids are able to understand the information and organize their thinking, they are prepared to synthesize it. 

      This can be used authentically in a classroom by having teachers tell a story about something in their life.  Then the teacher should model the process by thinking and talking about summarizing aloud. The teacher should highlight the importance of only telling the important parts and use simple wording. I think this is a great strategy to use in the classroom, especially in Kindergarten where students can go on forever about something that happened. To make this activity more authentic, students could practice telling their own personal stories but focusing on telling the important parts and using simple sentences to increase understanding. 

Authentic Questions

In Strategies that Work, Harvey and Goudvis state that authentic questions "are typically open-ended and encourage divergent thinking rather than one right answer" (p. 124). While reading the sample lessons, I really enjoyed the section Some Questions are Answered, Some are Not where the teacher lists all the questions that the students have and places different categories for questions that were answered, linked to background knowledge, inferred from the text, discussed, research to answer, and confusion. I really enjoyed how the entire class worked together to think of ways to answer questions. Personally, I would like to categorize my students questions to see how deeply they think about text. Even if I don't do it as a whole class, I would like to see those who make meaningful connections.

Do you think that we could ask questions such as the ones in the text to learn about our students understanding and opinions toward a text? What kind of questions could we model for the students so they understand and are exposed to authentic questions?