Blog Post 4: Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter nine, Spotlight on Inferring and Summarizing, focuses on ways to make sure students fully grasp the comprehension strategies taught to them. Comprehension strategies such as questioning, visualizing, inferring, and summarizing are discussed throughout this chapter. Chapter nine begins by giving great insight into how teachers incorporate whole class discussions and inferring on a daily basis during story time. A powerful statement that I found on reading stories to children is, “The beauty of storytelling is that the children have to create their own images, depending on the words of the story alone with no picture support. The point is to allow discussions to spring naturally from the ideas, confusions, connections, or questions that the students have”. In the past, I found it somewhat frustration when I would do storytelling or read-alouds with discussions throughout the story. I would always have students throw out comments that confused their classmates. The frustration would come from not knowing how to teach the students how to separate from making assumptions to making inferences. As the text stated, “Inferring is one strategy that we find often causes confusion for some teachers; it can be difficult to define and teachers can be unsure of how to teach for it”. The best way I learned to solve this issues is to model it for the students. I made inferences about a story as I read to the class.  

Before reading this chapter, I thought inferring was basically predicting, but inferring is much more than that. Inferring is basically figuring out something that the author doesn’t actually say within the story. Predicting is guessing and inferring is using context clues within a story to search for a fact. An example of inferring from the chapter is: “We read this sentence to any class of students-“The children put on their mittens and scarves and went out in the snow to play-then ask them, “What season is it?” and they always know it is winter”. This chapter raised my awareness of inferring and its importance.

After chapter nine focuses on inferring, the next focus is on teaching summarizing to students. From the text, I learned how to successfully model summarizing for young students. “When a reader summarizes he or she: deletes unimportant information, highlights important words or phrases, and puts ideas in his or her own words. Students need to hear you think aloud and see you do these things: cross out extra and/or repeated words, circle important words and phrases, and write in the margins”. I incorporated this into the classroom this week by modeling how to summarize exactly the way the text instructs. Then, I assigned the students to think about a book they recently read and to summarize the books or story in their notebooks. I reminded the students to tell the main ideas of the story without giving away the ending of the story. Since I was with second graders, I did walk them through this by asking questions such as: “What is the main ideas in the story? What are some important details in your story? How do you know they are important? Did these details cause a problem in the story?”. This assignment went very well. I only had a couple of students who needed one-on-on or small group support in completing this assignment.

Chapter ten, Assessment: Looking Closely at Readers, focuses on different aspects of assessing. The main point of this chapter is making sure the assessments used in the classroom are authentic, ongoing, and informative. Taking notes is a part of every guided reading lesson, and reflecting on the anecdotal notes allows us to see patterns and behaviors that change over time (p.182). Since I technically never had my own classroom with the same students, I do find it to be overwhelming to think about organizing all the assessment information on my students. I’ve been in classrooms where the teacher used sticky notes for everything, but that never seemed like a good idea. It only caused their desk to look like a complete mess in my opinion. The organizational technique I learned about in this chapter that I would like to adopt into the classroom would be the class grid for each subject taught, the monthly class list for reading, and the individual student forms (pgs. 191-194). The examples given in the text for thee organizational techniques appear to be very effective