Determining Importance in Text:
Big Idea-
Student must practice reading to answer questions and reading for information. Reading is about purpose, and there is a time and place for every type of reading, reading for details as well as reading for the big picture (Ch.10)
In my classroom students do not understand why they are reading certain material nor what information they should look for. As prospective teachers, I think it is vital for us to teach our students reading for "details" is not the main focus; instead reading is about "purpose".
How can we teach students the important aspects of reading? (i.e. How to look for important information or reading to answer questions?)
Synthesizing Information:
Big Idea-
After a reader identifies what is important in the text, he or she must go through the process of organizing, recalling, and recreating the information and fitting it in with what is already known.
Students can synthesize information by:
Making margin notes
Comparing and contrasting properties
Taking notes (etc)
There is absolutely no practice of synthesizing information being used in my classroom. My students are mainly low-level readers and writers, however, I don't understand why synthesizing information isn't being used. In my opinion, my class should be able to start practicing writing notes while reading informational text.
When should students start practicing synthesizing information? Is third grade too early to start practicing synthesizing information?
First of all, is this the last blog post ever?! According to the schedule, I think so :). Anyways, back to work...
ReplyDeleteThis is very relevant to my guided lead teaching because I am teaching the students how to find the main idea and details in a story. My MT said that this skill is very difficult for students to understand, probably one of the most difficult comprehension strategies they will learn this year. From reading this post, I am now thinking about how I will teach my students main idea and details, while at the same time keeping in mind that they also need to begin learning the skill of reading for a purpose. I think this will be difficult to do, especially within Reading Street, but I would like to start so that they can start to learn how to take notes and get meaning from a text.
I don't think that third grade is too early to start practicing synthesizing information, I think that it is never too early. I think that even starting in first grade would be beneficial. Obviously this would be on a more simple level, such as just figuring out what the purpose of reading every text is. Then you can start to teach them how to gather information from text and how to transfer that information from their minds to notes or another form that is readable.
Teaching students the important aspects of reading is something that I have not seem taught in my classroom this year, at least I haven't noticed it. Have you seen it explicitly taught in your classrooms? How is it taught and if it is then during what time of the day and for what purpose?