The start of the new school year is almost upon us! My classroom exists in a perpetual state of chaos and disorder! While it's hard to...

    This year, my students have been writing text-dependent analysis essays every other week as part of the Wonders program. It's been i...

 I like to look at "homework" as an ongoing set of reading activities that students can do either in or out of school. Some studen...

This year I've been working on new Article Response sets to use as ongoing practice and homework with sixth graders. They have worked w...

         For many students, summarizing a narrative is far easier than summarizing nonfiction. Narratives are organized in time order, t...

It's been nine years since I wrote a book about summarizing , and I keep feeling like I learn more and more. This year, as I've m...

This summer, I'm reading The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons at the recommendation of my 16-year-old. While I would never use this wi...

When it comes time to summarize stories, many intermediate readers just don't know what to do with the dialogue. They know that dialogue...

   This week, Pinterest has repeatedly coughed up a pin with a generic summary frame. "Use with any informational text!" the capti...

Picture books are a great way to help students summarize. After an engaging shared read, teachers and students together can work to summariz...

Summarizing a narrative seems like it should be easy. After all, stories are told in chronological order. We experience life in chronologica...

Yesterday I wrote about teaching paraphrasing . Readers need to be able to paraphrase, and to have fun with putting ideas into new words. ...

Waaayyy long ago when I taught seventh grade, I had a folder in my filing cabinet called "Paraphrasing". I had a few worksheets in...

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of pulling out my presentation suitcases and doing a presentation about summarizing. I've been pres...

Summarizing is very important in the Common Core. What do students need to be able to do? How can we prepare them for these demands? It can ...