Sun Belt Book Group
Book weblog for Sun Belt
Time is (Finally) On My Side
Well, I finally have my book and have some time to sit down and read. I just finished reading only the first chapter, but thought I better blog a bit since I’m behind.
As I was reading, several thoughts popped into my head. I reflected back on my teaching from previous years and recalled how my teaching practices evolved. I remember cringing a little inside when I noticed the upcoming skill called ”summarization” appear on our pacing guide. I didn’t really have enough knowledge of how to properly summarize something myself, so this made it even harder to translate this skill to a group of third graders. The third paragraph on page 2 hit home to me. My students struggled with the same issues – some were including unimportant details, some were too detailed, others were not detailed enough, and very few “got it”.
It wasn’t until this year, when our school’s reading coach trained our grade level using The Comprehension Toolkit,that I felt like I did a better job teaching summarization. This kit was supposedly something the state purchased for all third grade teachers who had been trained through the Alabama Reading Initiative. I’m not a big fan of a “scripted curriculum”, but after teaching a few lessons, it was easy to see the teaching process and adapt it to my personal language. I was skeptical at first, but I found that the students really learned some useful comprehension strategies that transferred to subjects across the curriculum. Like this book mentions, I have found through this “toolkit” that it is better to summarize very small chunks of information, especially for the age of students that I teach. Here’s the link to the toolkit site if you are interested: http://www.comprehensiontoolkit.com/
I am looking forward to reading about the creative strategies used to teach summarization and implementing them this upcoming school year. I am hoping that through this, I will be less likely to “cringe” when teaching summarization and more likely to find comfort in the useful strategies that make this task less daunting.
-Amy
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I used the teacher toolkit lessons 2 years ago when I was teaching third grade at WMR. I loved them as well. It was hard when you are in a system that shies away from scripted texts to use something like the toolkit. My students loved the activities and they taught all of us, me included, new ways to look at things and perform tasks differently in the classroom. That is what I am taking away from this Summarization in Any Subject book ask well. There are so many ways to do things and it’s easy to get stuck in the same old way because we know it and are comfortable with it. I look forward to the next three weeks and the finishing of my masters degree, to learn new things and use them with my students.