Primary documents: Reading strategies and Excerpting

1. Primary documents: Reading strategies and Excerpting Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

2. Helping students read primary documents • Pre-reading strategies • Strategies to use during reading • Post-reading strategies

3. Why do students struggle with reading? • Decoding • Comprehension • Interest • Fluency

4. Pre-reading strategies

5. We need to help students establish a purpose for reading the document.

6. Preview the text: look at the title, author, date, headings, subheadings, pictures, captions under pictures, bold-face print and other graphics

7. After previewing the text, activate prior knowledge. Think about what you already know about the topic and the time period.

8. Predict what might happen in the text. Develop initial questions about the text.

9. Tools for purpose, previewing, activating and predicting….

10. Advance organizers: Advance organizers are pre-reading activities to activate prior knowledge and to show students the connections that exist among the key concepts in a document.

11. Analogy graphic organizers: helps students link new information to familiar concepts. It can be used with elementary through high school students to introduce a topic, guide comprehension while reading, or extend the learning after reading (Buehl, 2001).

13. Time to practice……

14. Strategies to use during reading

15. Example #1: • Visualize: create mental images • Make connections: link ideas in the text to prior knowledge and experiences • Question: use self-questioning, revise predictions, make note of your thinking • Make inferences: look for information not directly stated • Clarify word meaning: use context clues and knowledge of words • Monitor understanding: re-read, adjust reading rate, read ahead, skim text,

17. Good readers: • Look at pictures/word clues • Slide through the whole word • Skip hard words and then go back • Reread: Does it look right, sound right, and make sense? If not STOP and go back. • Spell the word out loud • Thinking of a rhyming word you know. • Chunk it: look for smaller words hiding inside

19. Let’s try a “during reading strategy” Use the SMART (Self-monitoring approach to reading and thinking) strategy while you read The United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony, 1873

20. Post-reading strategies

21. Venn diagrams • Fact or opinion • Different perspectives • Summarizing • Discussion web • Discussion questions

22. Discussion Webs (Alvermann, 1991) encourage full class participation in the discussion of a topic. This strategy incorporates all language arts areas: reading, writing, speaking/signing, and listening/watching and can be used with upper elementary students through high school.

24. Modifying primary sources: how do I know how much and what part of the document is necessary?

25. Before you start excerpting: • What is the purpose/reason for choosing the document? • What is the document’s significance? • What can/should we take away from the document?

26. Read the document and mark key phrases/sentences/passages that address the identified purpose of the document. • Once you identify what the document’s purpose is, you need to identify where that message lies.

27. You are ready to start cutting: • Look at the portions of the document that you did not identify as being critical to the overall message. • Block out a passage and re-read the document to see if the context is still appropriate. • It is critical that you don’t de-contextualize the document or its key ideas. • You need to keep enough of the document to ensure students will get the “big idea,” but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or unwieldy.

28. Let’s practice excerpting a document: • Go back to our original document, The United States v. Susan B. Anthony, and decide which parts of the document can be excerpted but still maintain the document’s integrity. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpvq6B62u_Y

29. For next time….. Please read a primary document and decide what part(s) of the document to excerpt.

30. Using Primary Sources