- Home
- Homework
- Book Talks
- Reading Group Novels
- A Wrinkle in Time
- Literature Groups
- Literature Groups 2
- Literary Terms
- Reading/Connections
- Reading/ Summarizing
- Reading/ Questioning
- Reading/ Monitoring
- Reading State Goals & Framework
- Research
- Science Fair 2011-2012
- Field Trips
- Science Cell Links
- Web Links 2011-2012
- Important Web Links 2010-2011
- Science 2010-2011
- Shedd Aquarium Visit 2010-2011
Comprehension Strategy. Summarizing
Reading Comprehension Strategy: Summarizing
What Is Summarizing?
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.
What Are We Doing When We Summarize?
We strip away the extra verbiage and extraneous examples. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the gist of what we've read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details necessary for supporting them.
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.
What Are We Doing When We Summarize?
We strip away the extra verbiage and extraneous examples. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the gist of what we've read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details necessary for supporting them.
Selective Underlining
What Is Selective Underlining?
Well, there's underlining, and there's underlining selectively. [By the way, even though I'm using the word "underlining," you can feel free to know that that also means highlighting.] The way to make underlining useful as a tool for comprehension is for it to be strategic, selective, and purposeful. The underlining must be undertaken toward particular ends.
Do you remember how wonderful it was to discover the highlighter, perhaps when you were in college? I know that for me, I was more likely NOT to read the stuff I was highlighting. For some reason, that's the effect that a highlighter had on me. Or maybe I'd look back at the selection and find I'd pretty much colored the whole darn thing yellow. With selective underlining (and highlighting!), the idea is to underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the piece. Students should be taught this strategy explicitly, given time and means to practice, and reinforced for successful performance.
Well, there's underlining, and there's underlining selectively. [By the way, even though I'm using the word "underlining," you can feel free to know that that also means highlighting.] The way to make underlining useful as a tool for comprehension is for it to be strategic, selective, and purposeful. The underlining must be undertaken toward particular ends.
Do you remember how wonderful it was to discover the highlighter, perhaps when you were in college? I know that for me, I was more likely NOT to read the stuff I was highlighting. For some reason, that's the effect that a highlighter had on me. Or maybe I'd look back at the selection and find I'd pretty much colored the whole darn thing yellow. With selective underlining (and highlighting!), the idea is to underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the piece. Students should be taught this strategy explicitly, given time and means to practice, and reinforced for successful performance.
A Walk in My World: International Short Stories About Youth
Grade 9 UpAn uneven collection of stories by writers from around the world. The introduction lays a good foundation for the various themes (rites of passage, the complexities of adulthood, etc.). There are certainly some strong selections here, such as Antonio Skrmetas The Composition, in which young Pedro learns of his parents true feelings toward Chiles fascist government. Also guaranteed to strike a nerve with teens is Pramoedya Ananta Toers Inem, a story centering around an eight-year-old girls pending nuptials and the unfortunate situation that follows. Other entries present situations young adults will sympathize with and find interesting, but several of the offerings lack the plots and themes that usually sustain teen interest, and some of them seem to lose something in translation. Brief biographies of the authors are appended. This collection offers many compelling tales for pleasure reading or classroom discussion, but has too many misses to be considered as a first purchase.
Yankee Girl, by Mary Ann Rodman
Based on the author's experience as a white child of an FBI agent who was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 to support the fight for civil rights, this first novel brings the terrifying racism close-up: the name-calling (including the n-word), the cruel segregation, the Klan violence. Alice ("Yankee Girl") Moxley, the new girl in school, is desperate to be accepted, but she knows how much worse it is for her classmate Valerie, the only black student. Introducing each chapter, newspaper headlines chart the political struggle, but the honesty of Alice's narrative moves this beyond docu-novel. She's much more concerned with the Beatles and clothes than with politics--but the racism is always there. She admires a classmate who challenges the in-crowd, but Alice is not a noble freedom fighter; she likes Valerie and talks to her, but only when no one else is around. The real tension is whether Alice can move from being bystander to standing up for what she believes.
Sunrise Over
Robin's parents aspire for him to go to college, but following September 11, he feels compelled to join the Army instead. By early 2003, Robin has completed Basic Training and is deployed to Iraq where he becomes part of a Civil Affairs Unit charged with building the trust of the Iraqi people to minimize fighting. Civil Affairs soldiers are often put into deadly situations to test the waters, and Robin finds that the people in his unit, who nickname him "Birdy," are the only ones he can trust. Robin quickly learns that the situation in Iraq will not be resolved easily and that much of what is happening there will never make the news. Facing the horrors of war, Robin tries to remain hopeful and comforting in his letters to his family, never showing his fear or the danger he actually faces. The story of teenagers going to war today is an important one, and it is not told often enough. Myers writes an important book to have in any collection to recognize that many teens will choose to join the military instead of, or before, going on to college. Robin is only eighteen, and it is difficult to watch his innocence erased as war leaves its mark on him, but it is the reality for many young men and women.