Summarizing and the Common Core: Grades 2-4

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 be helpful to look at the requirements grade by grade.

Grade 2, RI 2: Identify the main topic of a multiparagraph text as well as the focus of specific paragraphs within the text.

Looking at topics is a very important first step to summarizing. I tell students that a topic can describe a text in one or two words. Often, kids will overgeneralize with topics. For example, consider this book about tigers. Try showing students a page from the text without the heading. What is the topic? Many of them will go right back to the topic of the entire book--tigers. But each page in this book has a more specific topic. Can kids find this more specific topic? An easy way to have kids work with this is to cover up the headings with sticky notes and have kids try to write their own headings for each page. (By the way, my own almost-second grader loves the National Geographic kids book--I think we own just about every single one! They are well-written, widely available, and inexpensive.)

Grade 3, RI 2: Determine the main idea of a text, recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea.

Hmm..."recount the key details" sounds a great deal like retelling, doesn't it? As students progress to longer informational texts in third grade, it is important that they continue to practice retelling so that they can work on remembering important information from a text. This activity helps students to practice retelling.

I wrote this Finding Topics and Main Ideas presentation several years ago. This presentation is an easy way to help students find those main ideas and key details in text.

Explaining how details support a main idea can be trickier for third grade students, especially those who are not yet thinking abstractly. After all, the whole idea of details "supporting" a main idea is figurative. Working with opinion paragraphs (especially paragraphs that they find disagreeable!) can help them to understand how this process works. For more ideas, you can look at Main Ideas and Details in Nonfiction Text, which includes paragraphs for practice, a center activity, and a PowerPoint that clearly explains how details can support a main idea.

In third grade, students should also be expected to choose the best summary from several choices. This is a fairly easy activity to add to regular instruction. Watching which summary students choose can help you to learn about their reading processes.

Grade 4: Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text.

At fourth grade, formal summarizing begins. One mistake that I have made in the past is acting as if summarizing is difficult or unpleasant. ("Oh, we'll skip writing a summary this time--you've worked so hard today!") Summarizing needs to become a routine, something that students are used to doing frequently.

This lesson can help students learn the basics.

But just talking about the rules isn't enough to help students write successful summaries. They also need more experiences with choosing the best summary, critiquing summaries, and deciding which details need to go into a summary. For texts and activities to help students become more successful, you can look at Paraphrasing and Summarizing Lessons for Nonfiction Reading.

Next time, I'll write about increasing summarizing difficulty in grades 5-7. :)

Text Structure: Description

I have to admit that description has always been my least favorite text structure. It doesn't have the drama of cause and effect. It doesn't have the happy ending of problem and solution. For a writer, it doesn't offer the challenge of compare and contrast. Description just...is.

But several people asked if I was going to create a unit for description text structure, just as I've done for cause and effect, chronological order, problem/solution, and compare and contrast. When I looked around at my files, I realized that I really did already have some texts that fit the text structure.

And I enjoyed revisiting them. I found that the text structure of description can be interesting to write, and (hopefully!) to read. As I worked on "A Ferry to Cross the Water", I entertained family members with new and exciting facts about ferryboats. We don't have many ferries around here, so we all found the idea of a cruiseferry pretty interesting.

Revisiting "Schoolhouses of Long Ago" was a pleasure. This was one of the first longer texts that I tried to write, and I was pleased to work with it again. To add some complex text, I plumbed the depths of Google Books and found a book from 1832--with an author who had definite opinions about the state of America's schools. (Whatever problems my school may have, at least we are not subject to the "depredations of stray cattle" as described in the old book!)

You can find the resources for teaching description text here. I hope that you find them useful!

Common Themes

Last spring, I made a formatted set of themes mini-posters. This year, I'm going to use them to create a bulletin board in my classroom. After we read a text, we'll put the title of the book on an index card and post it under the theme.

Here are the mini-posters on Slideshare:

Common themes formatted

View more presentations from Emily Kissner

Other theme posts:
Troubleshooting theme

Teaching theme



 

Reading Intervention Ready! (Again)

The Reading Intervention that I talked about in the last post is active again and ready to download. I'll have it up for free until at least the end of the week--maybe later if I forget about it. :)

We spent the past week at the beach. My sons learned how to use the field guide and grew quite adept at telling the differences between the various kinds of egrets that we saw. Watching them look back and forth between the field guides convinced me that I must put up some bird feeders outside my classroom window this year. It was just fascinating to hear them talk--"Look here, it's a kind of egret"--and "I've never seen that one before, maybe it's a kind of heron?"

We also had a chance to see tiny ghost crabs up close, as well as the sika deer of Assateague. The sika deer are introduced species that I look forward to writing about. But best of all for my youngest? Right in the middle of Ocean City--a very built-up, commercial area--we could look down from our balcony and see foxes playing in the dunes!

Reading Intervention for Academic Vocabulary and Fluency

This year, our school went to an intervention block. Our fourth grade block was right after lunch. It was wonderful to have time to address issues with fluency and word work. But what would we teach?

At the end of the year, I had an interesting group of readers. Looking at our fluency data, we pulled together a group that was on the brink of reaching benchmark for the end of the year. I knew that I wanted to create something to help these readers become more automatic with reading.

Kids loved reading about poison ivy!

On the other hand, however, I didn't want to give any of these fourth graders the impression that reading is just a speed race. I needed to create something that carefully balanced working toward speed and accuracy with a focus on reading for meaning.

 Over the next few weeks, I wrote a series of short, nonfiction texts. All of these texts related to science and nature. (Not surprising!) For each text, I created a short PowerPoint to highlight and teach the academic vocabulary words. I also created a before reading activity and a graphic organizer to help students pay attention to the structural aspects of each text. All together, I created six texts, which allowed for six weeks of instruction.

I tried to make these texts as "natural" as possible, letting the topic and the vocabulary dictate the article. Therefore, the texts vary from fourth to sixth grade level with different readability formulas. For intermediate readers, this is just what happens with real world texts. They need to be able to move within a band of complexity throughout the school day.

If you teach fourth grade, this would be an excellent supplement for at and above grade level readers--perfect for enrichment during an intervention period.  Fifth grade readers who are slightly below grade level would benefit from this, as would ELLs in grades 5 and above. Struggling readers in grades 6 and up would find this beneficial as well.

To screen students and monitor progress, it's best to use a commercial program. But you can also use the short versions of the texts included within the unit to monitor progress across repeated readings of one text.

I loved teaching this, so I worked to put it together as a product on TeachersPayTeachers. I happily put together the 40 files and compressed the folder...only to find that it was a whopping 114 MB! I didn't want to cut out any of the gorgeous images from the PowerPoints, so I split it in four.

You can find all four parts over on TeachersPayTeachers. They will be free until July 15, after which I will change the pricing.  Please download and review! And do drop a comment or follow the blog.

Visualizing and the Common Core

Last Tuesday, I presented a workshop called "Reading Strategies and the Common Core". (I'll be doing it again at KSRA in October if you are interested in seeing it.) We had a great conversation about how reading strategy instruction fits in with the content standards of the Common Core.

Visualizing is not mentioned in the standards. However, teaching about visualizing fits pretty neatly within several standards. (I'll be referring to the general K-5 standards below, not the grade-specific ones.)

Key Ideas and Details, 1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from text.

Visualizing is a kind of inferring. When readers visualize, they fill in missing details with their own background knowledge. It can be fun to talk with readers about how they visualized a sentence or paragraph, and find out which words or phrases led them to create the pictures they built.

The assessment page below can help you to see how readers are (or are not) making inferences as they read.

Visualizing Passages and Assessments

View more documents from Emily Kissner

Key Ideas and Details, 3: Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

At first, it may be hard to see how visualizing fits in here. But this standard requires readers to track ideas within a text. Tracking requires mental energy! The concentration and stamina that students build from trying to create mental images from text will help them to track more abstract ideas later. On a more concrete level, visualizing events from a text helps readers to understand and process what happens.

Craft and Structure, 4: Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

As teachers begin teaching figurative language, often they focus on the identification--Can you find a simile? A metaphor? But the new standards point heavily toward interpretation. What does this simile mean? How does the author develop an idea by comparing these items? What is the author trying to tell us with this personification?

This is where visualizing becomes important.  Consider the poem "The Railway Train" by Emily Dickinson:

I like to see it lap the miles, 
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;

Visualizing the train as it moves across the countryside is the sure way to understand how the personification builds the author's main ideas. (Side note--Does anyone else visualize the Island of Sodor with this poem? One more sign that raising two sons will irrevocably change the brain!)

As you can see, visualizing is one reading strategy that will still be important to readers as we transition to the Common Core.

Update August 2014: Here are some additional Visualizing Resources from my TpT store.

Science Standards Workshop

What a week! On Tuesday, I presented a workshop related to the Common Core standards for reading; on Friday, I'm presenting an outdoor workshop focused on science standards. Here are the resources that we'll be talking about at Friday's workshop--in between hiking and checking out all of the great locations for science instruction.

Curriculum Framework: Use this page to find the specific standards for each grade level.

Environmental Literacy Plan Draft: Follow the link on this page to learn about Pennsylvania's environmental literacy plan. You can also sign up for the newsletters on the right side of the screen.

Stream Study Practice Samples: At this site, kids can practice assessing the health of a stream with sample stream data.

For a more hands-on activity, I photocopied pictures of different macroinvertebrates and glued them to the bottom of paper "rocks". Then, I arranged various combinations of these "rocks" on large blue paper, and gave each group a different sample stream.

Pennsylvania Geological Survey: Very detailed information about Pennsylvania's geology.

BioBlitz: A BioBlitz is a focused event in which volunteers gather to find and document as many species as possible. Information about conducting a BioBlitz can be found at this website. (Nawakwa would be an ideal location for this. To my knowledge, nothing of this scale has been attempted. It would be fascinating to try to monitor species throughout the year.)

Narrows Stream Bank Stabilization Project: This document shows how stream banks along the Conewago in the Narrows were restored through an EPA project. This would be a good reading selection.

Geology of Adams County: A nice map showing the different formations in Adams County.

Pennsylvania Groundwater areas of concern: This easy article includes the fruit belt as an area of concern for groundwater resources. It would be an interesting text for students to consider in a study of groundwater.

Watershed Alliance of Adams County: A great source for information on local projects and watershed efforts.