Jigsaw Post! Week Who Knows Now!

This weeks post we were each supposed to read 2 chapters from 10-14. I decided to read 10 & 11. Chapter 10 was about the importance of a text and how to find the importance of a text. It included who the texts are importance. Determining importance of opinion, historical fiction, non-fiction books, and how to write what is important. This didn't seem challenging until I started reading and I started thinking about my students and then myself. My students I feel would struggle with trying to find out the importance of the text, or the purpose to why we are reading a text. Then I began thinking about myself. I still question why we read certain reading and finding relevance. Sure, it is easy enough in an information piece to say "it is important to share information with us and learn from the reading" but to read a fictional story, not a historical fiction story, but just a fictional story, that seems harder to justify. The chapter talked about non-fiction, opinion pieces, which seemed easy enough for me to explain. It was the fiction pieces I struggled with. Why read Stone Fox in my third grade class? Why is that such a widely selected book to read? I understand it gives the opportunity to learn objectives and CCSS, but are there better books to use? And how do you explain that to your students? Do you blunty tell them they need to to meet state/district standards? Then what happens when you have students who say, "well why?".

Chapter 11 was about summarizing and synthesizing information. It is about summarizing and retelling, which I feel we have focused on quite a bit in my classroom. But is also about students knowledge and being able to revise their thinking. I think what the most challenging part of the chapter that I had to reflect on was being able to take what was most important in a text and being able to apply that in writing and be able to pull out the most important information given. Those way can be done through questions, inferencing, and projects that students can use to teach others in the classroom. I am sure for this blog post at least, most of us know that the last two ideas may be a little harder for our kids. We can teach kids what the summaries are and what the important details we need to include. That can easily be mastered. Using it as a cause and effect, "this is important because it caused this to happen later" may be more challenging but can be taught/learned as well. But converting that into writing, having students asking questions. reading between the lines, and independently doing projects may be a lot harder for other students to do, especially if parent help is not given at home. I think the hardest part is transferring the information into writing. Making sure to include information that is factual but incorporating their own feelings into the writing. With my kids, I have noticed that they either include one or the other, but drawing answers from the reading when not in a multiple choice answer is incredibly hard for the students. Does anyone else see that? If not, how is it taught in your class after learning to summarize, how to get those important thoughts on paper?