Summarizing and Note-taking
I loved the videos’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF9Z8fXQ2jk) explanation of how to teach summarizing. This past year I had two students who really struggled with summarizing. The class had moved onto other writing/reading strategies. But when I took my two students with me into the Resource Room, we spent a lot of time practicing the summarizing skill. I never felt like my students really understood the concept of what a summary was so even though they were able to answer my prompts and end up with a summary, they could not replicate the process on their own. I had a hard time trying to think of another way of teaching it. I would give them reading passages, ask them for the main ideas, and then have them connect those ideas to form a summary. I tried all different kinds of reading passages, short ones, interest based ones, non-fiction, fiction, pretty much with all the same results.
This video we watched though put the idea of how to teach summarizing from a completely different perspective. The video looks at it almost from the opposite point of view. It suggests working backwards, instead of looking for the main idea first, look at your passage and cross out the unnecessary information, then cross out the redundant information, next you replace specific information with more general information, and lastly, find a topic sentence or make one up. This makes so much sense! Instead of asking the kids to think of the main idea first, get rid of the extra information they don’t need. Especially for my students where having too much information can be overwhelming; I think this strategy will eliminate some of the jumble of extra information, which will make the process easier. I am so excited to try it with them!