Summarizing and Using Textbooks

This week I chose to read chapters 11 and 14 in Strategies that Work.

Chapter 11 is about summarizing and synthesizing information. I chose to read this chapter because at the end of the month my students have a book report due and part of their book report requires them to briefly summarize the story they read. Summarizing text is still a challenge for many of my fifth graders. It is difficult for them to decide which details are important to retell and which details are not needed. In the section called “Writing a Short Summary,” (p.188-189) the teacher tells her students to consider three things when they are summarizing a text. 1) Pick out the most important ideas. 2) Keep it brief. 3) Say it in your own words in a way that makes sense. I think that the third idea is the most important. Many of my students want to just rewrite what is written in their books. But they will have a better understanding of what they read if they are able to say it using their own words. I think that to help my students understand summarizing, it would be good to summarize something together as a class. Then students who are struggling can see how other people summarize.

Chapter 14 is about reading to understand textbooks. I think that the most important thing in this chapter is that students need to be taught how to use a textbook. Textbooks are full of resources such as glossaries, indexes, maps, charts, and other helpful pieces of information. But unless we teach our students how to use these things they will not be able to take advantage of what their textbooks have to offer. At the start of the year my MT had our students do a scavenger hunt of their social studies textbook so that they could become familiar with the different parts of the book. I think this was a good idea because she was also able to explain how to use different parts of the book when they went over the answers as a class. In this chapter they also talked about teaching students how to take notes from textbooks (p. 238). I think this is really important because textbooks an have so much information that it can be hard for students to pick out the important details. (Just like it can be hard for them to pick out the important details when they are summarizing what they read.)

What chapters did you choose to read from Strategies that Work? What did you think was interesting or important?

Creating Mental Movies

From reading chapter 9 of Strategies That Work I've realize that visualizing and inferring a book are two mental processes at are connected.  "When we visualize, we are in fact inferring, but with mental images rather than words and thoughts" (p.131).  Students that are able to infer can understand a book implicitly.  Inferring entails an "umbrella" of avenues where students can understand a book.  Inferring kind of reminds of being a detective where students use explicit evidence from the book, such as language and context to creating a deeper understanding of what the book is about.

When reading any kind of book making mental movies or visualizing what is happening is what makes reading exciting.  The authors make an interesting point on pg. 132 about books turned into movies.  I agree with the authors' statement that something is lost from the a book when it's transformed and shorted to fit a average time frame of a movie.  However,  I think movies are a resource to enhance thinking with students.  I believe that students should be reading books rather than trying to just watch the movie to get the essence of a book.  However, after reading a book it would be good a to watch the movie of it.  I watching the movie about a book could clear up misunderstanding and create discussions of similarities and differences of the book and movie.  What are your opinions of showing videos that were made from a novel?

Chapter 9 also gives great lessons on how to encourage students to visualize and infer.  I really like the lesson of "Visualizing with Wordless Picture Books" on page 133.  I originally thought that using books where the author uses detailed descriptions would be the best what for students to visualize.  However, this lessons showed me that even with picture books visualizing with wordless books helps readers build meaning as they go" and offer many opportunities for students to "fill in" pictures between the pages.  Is there a wordless picture book that you word recommend to use for a lesson like this?

Feedback from Cheryl

Hello Funky Fireflies,  You are all doing a great job of reading carefully and making key connections to your classroom experiences. I am seeing more and more interaction within your blog posts with a thread of an idea being followed through in others' posts so that your blog is becoming very conversational.  Now I'd like to encourage you to take the next step and share any insights/thoughts/comments or disagreements you have with any ideas posted so that you are challenging one another and pushing each others' thinking. This doesn't need to be done in a critical way--it can be more in the spirit of 'devil's advocate' or just, "I was wondering..."  You're off to a great start with your blog!

Rubrics - A Good Assessment Tool?

This week my MT gave me the opportunity to instruct an ‘All About Me’ PowerPoint lesson for the kids. This technology is very new for the students and some have never even heard of a PowerPoint before. My job for the next few weeks is to introduce them to them to the technology and instruct a lesson or two on how to create a presentation that reads many things about who they are. Furthermore, I must create a rubric to help me assess not only their PowerPoint skills but also their writing content, spelling and grammar. I must say, I am pretty stumped on how to design a rubric for this task.

“Make Assessment Count”, from “Writing Essentials” was eye opening for me. Routman talked about many important things such as putting rubrics into perspective. As I began to write my rubric, I automatically wrote a list of things that my students must write about in their presentations. At first this sounded like a good idea but, Routman makes a lot of sense when he suggests that this “sends a message to students that writing to the formula matters, not the content.” I guess if students were told what to write about, it limits their own development of ideas. And if one of our goals as teachers is for our student’s writing to improve, we must assess writing with a broader lens. How else will our students become ‘free’ writers?

Rubrics do have a good purpose of helping students stay on track of the task and help teachers evaluate and prepare further instruction as needed. However, when it comes to using rubrics, Routman clearly says, “Don’t overdo it.” But, it’s important not to focus so much on a checklist that you end up losing track of what the child is trying to do, which may be something not in the rubric but something worth positive recognition. Routman says, “It is not advisable to apply rubrics to all writing nor to score all writing. Just as our students need lots of practice reading many texts without expectation that they will be assessed on everything they read, they need lots of practice writing without being assessed on everything they write.”

I’m really glad to have read this during the time of trying to design my own rubric. And although I am indeed using a rubric, I will try not to ‘rubricize’ my students, as Routman puts it. I will give my students the freedom to develop their own ideas in their presentations and try to pay attention to the big picture at what my students are trying to say. I actually love the idea of creating a child-friendly rubric as mentioned in the chapter. If there will be guidelines, I guess the least I can do is collect student’s input as to what they want to include in the rubric. What do you all think about rubrics? Do any of you have ideas for how to design a rubric without ‘rubricizing’ students? What assessment tools have you seen or used that you really like working within your classrooms?