Top Ten Strategies 9 and 10

Outlining and Summarizing

Outlining and summarizing are great tools to use for understanding the content of the text. Outlining reveals the basic structure of the text; summarizing helps the students understand the main idea in the text. The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. Outlining the main ideas would help the students discover the meaning of the content. I think this will be a helpful tool in the classroom when dealing with complex ideas. After outlining and summarizing the material, the students can then use the information as a study guide. I would like to have the students work on the outline as a whole class and then individually on the summary. I would then like the students to share their summaries and guide them as necessary.

Rereading

            Rereading is an important tool to use in any classroom. This critical reading strategy is also useful for all scopes of readers, not just the ELP students. Rereading is the number one strategy used by independent readers and the last strategy used by dependent readers. Independent readers will reread the text until they understand the material, while dependent readers will simple skip over the text they don’t understand.

I see rereading as helping the students understand what they didn’t the first time around. This is also a great tool to use as a review to refresh the mind before a test. I plan on using the rereading strategy for my students that are having a hard time comprehending the text. I would also like my strong readers to reread and see if they can find something new in the text they hadn’t picked up on before.

Both of these strategies are great to use with critical reading/ literacy.