After-Reading+09

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=After-Reading Strategies=

Activities that Help Students Construct Meaning After Reading a Text
-One activity a teacher can use to help students construct meaning after reading a text is a scale. Scales should consist of 4-6 items and can be used for many different objectives. Likert scales are focused on generalizations about characters, themes, conflicts, or symbolism. The items in the scale should not have clear-cut answers in the text so that students can demonstrate their own opinion of the text and their own understanding of it. Semantic differential scales have opposite character traits on either end of the scale and students rate how much of the trait a character posseses. This scale focuses on character development and can be used to show character changes in a text. These scales enable students to engage in discussions about the texts they read to explain their choices, draw conclusions, make inferences, make connections to their own experiences, and use the text to support their reasoning.---Kylene Beers __When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do__ Ch.8 ~Amanda

Summarizing
In addition to the scales, which Amanda describes above, a strategy entitled "Somebody Wanted but so" is another strategy to use after students read a text. It is best used when summarizing a story or novel is intimidating to the students. SWBS allows students to build a summary within an already provided framework. Here's how it works: students read a story and decide the somebody, what that somebody wanted, but what happened to keep something from happening, and, to conclude, how everything works out. This exercise moves students closer to writing summaries independently (Beers 144-5). --Lindsey

Frey, Fisher, and Hernandez, in their article, “’What’s the Gist?’ Summary Writing for Struggling Adolescent Readers,” outline a specific strategy for summarizing a text. In this GIST strategy, “The text is divided into sections that serve as stopping points for clarification and writing. At each stop point, the meaning of the passage is discussed, vocabulary is explained, and a single summary sentence is negotiated” (p. 45). Teachers help students work through the whole text in this manner, and afterwards the list of sentences is used as a summary of the text as a whole. ~Amy

Frey suggests that a theme helps narrow down important parts of the text so that students are clued in on what they need to include in their summary. The class described in the text was focused on survivor texts. The students were guided to important main points, because of the overarching themes in the texts. This exercise would be especially helpful in Science and History classes where the theme is often more explicit. Students can practice summarising historical events that led up a to war or biological processes that created a certain speciies. In general Frey believes that summarizing helps students prepare to write "research reports and persuasive essays" that they will have to write in high school, college, and in many work places. -Stephany

Frey, Fisher, and Hernandez presented an interesting and what looks to be effective way of summarizing texts. When I was taught about writing summaries I was simply told that a summary should contain a beginning, middle and end just liek the story did and it should touch on the key points of the story. As i got older I pretty much kept this mentality and just lengthened the writings (summaries). This Gist strategy will help students have designated stoppoints at which they can ask themselves questions and better understand the text, thus creating a better understanding of this text and ultamently yielding a better summary in the future. -Jeff