Summarizing and Notetaking

If I had to pick a skill that my first graders always seem to have a hard time with, it would be summarizing. They really need a lot of support and guidance while learning about summarizing even the simplest stories. They are not sure usually what facts are most important and those that are not important to the main idea of the story. Usually, they try to retell the whole story. We spend a lot of time distinguishing between retelling and summarizing what they have read. I always try to have them summarize as though they were telling their parents what they read about in school. This helps them focus more on the important facts that they would tell someone. This isn't always the most effective method though and I really like some of the frames for summarizing. I think they would really clarify things for the students. I always orally review the items on the Narrative Frame, but I think that maybe having a poster with the questions to use for each story would be helpful. I don't ever remember being taught this skill directly myself, so I want to try even harder to give my students the tools to be able to summarize effectively.

Notetaking is something I try to introduce the students to early on. This year, we started by researching foxes. We selected several books and broke up into two groups to read them. During and after reading, the teachers were the scribes and we wrote down facts that were important about foxes. I discussed with students my thought process as well when I write notes and that I choose to write phrases and note complete sentences. The groups then compared their notes to see what was the same and different. Each group noticed the books focused on slightly different things, but that most of the info was the same. I then showed the students during a shared writing how to turn their notes into a written non-fiction piece. Gradually, I will do less and less of the directing and they will do most of the notetaking themselves or in groups. I like that the chapter mentioned the different methods of notetaking too. I think in school kids are often shown one basic way to take notes and that might not work for them. I plan on trying to show them more of a variety of notetaking types throughout the year.