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.