Before reading

Teacher should bring in Norman Rockwell pictures and lead discussions about what the pictures reflect. Bring in family pictures and discuss what the pictures reflect. Discuss that pictures hold memories.

Objective: Students will clarify understanding by summarizing important events and ideas of a story incident.

Information for the teacher: Comprehension strategy — Synthesizing information

Ideas taken from the book, Strategies That Work page 25, also see chapter 10. “Synthesizing information involves combining new information with existing knowledge to form an original idea, a new line of thinking, or a new creation.” ... “The need to sift important ideas from interesting details is one challenge that trade literature presents to readers. It is often so well written that rich less important details carry readers away from the essential ideas. In order to synthesize what they read, readers need to stop every now and then, think about what they have read, and take stock of meaning before continuing on through the text. When readers synthesize, they

stop and collect their thoughts before reading on
sift important ideas from less important details
summarize the information by briefly identifying the main point
combine these main points into a larger concept or bigger idea
make generalizations about what they have read

Discuss what is synthesis. Discuss with students how summarizing a story or incident is a way of briefly retelling it by including the most important things that happened while leaving out less important details.

During reading

Set purpose — while you are reading today I want you to synthesize what you are learning. Read each section about the picture then tell your partner something you learned from this season. I call this “Say Something.”

Read Oranges then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

Read Birthday Party then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

Read Picking Napal Cactus then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

Read Hammerhead Shark then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

Read Making Tamales then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

Read Beds for Dreaming then tell your partner details that support the main idea.

After reading

Discuss the events of what happened in each picture in the story by completing GIST or

WHO WANTED BUT SO

Students bring a picture and write about it what family event the picture represents.

Example of WHO WANTED BUT SO

After reading chapter one from The Jacket by Andrew Clements

WHO Phil

WANTED to get his brother’s jacket back from the black kid named Daniel

BUT Daniel claimed it was a birthday present from his Grandmother

SO they ended up in the principal’s office

Teaching Summary with GIST

Directions: Read text. The GIST of something is the main idea. Sometimes we don’t need to remember all the details but read just to get the gist of the material.

Procedure:

Draw 20 word sized blanks on the chalkboard.
After reading a short section (in this care two pages of text), students will write a 20 word summary to give the gist of what they read.
Now, read additional section of text (in this case two more pages of text). Information form both sections must be incorporated into a new 20 word summary.
It is possible to read a third section of text (in this case the rest of the text) and condense the summary one more time.

GIST is taken from pp 130-131, Developing Readers and Writers in the Content Area K-12, Third Edition (Moore, Moore, Cunningham, and Cunningham, 1998)

________ ________ ________ ________ ________

Warnings for GIST

Choose your text carefully! If there is too much important information, it will be very difficult or impossible to condense the information to a 20 word summary.
Be prepared to walk the students through the process of summarizing the first several times.
With each additional section of text, it becomes more difficult to summarize. For that reason, call on struggling readers toward the beginning of the activity. This will allow more students to participate.

For example,

After a misunderstanding over ownership of a jacket two boys of different races deals with prejudice issues while learning acceptance.

Some more hints for the teacher:

When teaching students to write a summary, encourage the children to use these words: first, next. Think about these ideas: Is it important to understand this piece, include concrete, sequential, beginning, middle, end