It all started with the book Close Reading of Informational Text by Sunday Cummins.
In this book Cummins gives a lot of great lessons for teaching students how to find the main idea in non-fiction. She like to emphasize the strategy of synthesis, which she teaches by using a framed photograph. Showing the students a framed photo she asks: Of all the photos I own, why did I decide to frame this one? Students start with the details in the picture and then use synthesis to help them understand the significance of these details. This leads to why the picture was framed.
As I was reading this book, I did some synthesis of my own. We have been learning about non-fiction text structures for the past two months. I realized that knowing the text structure gives us a huge clue as to the main idea. By adding the strategy of synthesis, we can understand the significance of the details in the text. And, finally, we can show off all these strategies by using T.E.E.R.:
T = TTQA (turn the question around)
E = evidence from the text
E = explain why this evidence is significant
R = restate the TTQA
I combined all of this information on a poster for my students showing how we start with a "mission", then use the text and a strategy to create a well-written open response. Although I have talked about all these things before, I have never combined them with this kind of explicit teaching before. The initial results have been outstanding!
What kind of skills can YOU combine together?
To conclude, no post would be great without a FREEBIE. I created this worksheet to help my advanced students improve their sentence fluency. I listed eight words that begin complex sentences. These are words like although, after, if, since, and because. Students fill in the rest of the sentence after the complex modifier.
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