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.
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.
