Re-telling and Summarizing: Strategies and Interventions

So, how are your interventions going?  Are your students making progress in the area of re-telling and summarizing?

As teachers of reading, we all know that if a student cannot re-tell the story, he/she will have difficulty making deeper inferences, answering questions about the text, connecting with the characters, and, most importantly, enjoying the story. And re-telling, along with summarizing, is a skill that can be honed beginning in kindergarten all the way to college (think of all those undergraduate and graduate students who write abstracts summarizing research).  As an interventionist teacher supporting second and third grade students in the area of reading, I am constantly grappling with how to best support my little friends with their re-tell and/or summary {fiction texts...nonfiction texts need their own blog post!}.  After reading a book during guided reading, I would pull out a graphic organizer, and think to myself, "this doesn't really match the story structure," or "this doesn't allow the student to include the most important details."  So I began to look at the results of my assessments more carefully, searched some of the professional literature, and began differentiating my approaches in order to better break down this important component of comprehension.

Monitoring Your Reading = Passing Level 1 of a Video Game

So I've put in a few years of trial and error into creating this resource, Re-telling and Summarizing Fiction Texts:  Interventions and Strategies.  I can tell you how I've put in my heart and soul into creating these graphic organizers and anchor charts to help my students, and I really think they will help your learners, too.  And eventually, I will get into the details of each strategy and how they address specific student needs and text structures.  But instead, I'm going to begin with the ending because it's my favorite part of this story, really the best part of the story:  winning level one of the video game.

Clip art courtesy of Paula Kim Studio

Character Traits List & Vocabulary Support

As we have entered the month of August, every teacher, whether she likes it or not, starts thinking about school.  Some of us have dreams (or nightmares).  Some of us go on a Pinterest spree.  We walk through Target and ask ourselves "What do I 'need' from the dollar section?"

You don't do this?  Okay, maybe it's just me.  Anyway, we are also thinking about what were some of our students' challenges last year, and how we will address them this year.  My third and fourth graders had difficulty with vocabulary and making inferences, which was evident in how they would describe their characters:

Nice

Mean

Sad

Oh my.

Math resources galore!!

Switching grade levels is frustrating.  Switching positions AND grade levels is just insane.  Just a little.  It also doesn't help your blogging skills.  Well, anyway, my job is to provide intervention in literacy and math in the upper elementary grades.  In my humble opinion, there are approximately a bazillion (read:  too many to count) resources, programs, and books that talk about literacy intervention.  Because there is a lack of resources for math, it's become my mission as of late to discover these resources that provide some insight about strategies and approaches to reach struggling learners as well as possible resources for parents.  I know there are a few good books on math intervention strategies; however time and money are not on my side, so my best friend Google and I have sifted through many search result pages, and I've created a list of blogs and websites that look promising.  If you know of more resources, please, please share them.