What Was That Middle Part Again?
by John Pearson
I have been teaching a new subject for the past couple of weeks - English Language Arts. At least, it's new to me. I've taught math and science for the past five years, but ELA for only two weeks. So I'm learning new strategies and tools for teaching things like Main Idea and Sequencing.
For the past two weeks, our central concept has been summarization. An essential part of reading comprehension, summarization is picking out the most important parts of the story or passage.
One handy little tool for visually representing a summarization is a BME foldable. While this may sound like a wallet belonging to a Biomedical Engineer, it's actually a way to show the Beginning, Middle, and End of a story.
Imagine a piece of paper folded in half lengthwise (or "hotdog style" for the gastronomically challenged). The front half is cut into three equal sections, creating "doors" for each part of the story. On the inside, the children write an important event from each part and draw a picture of that event.
What I am finding is that it's somewhat difficult to teach the ability to pick the most important event in a section of the story. We've done concept maps, where we list all of the things that happened, but I always have several kids who choose a minor detail as their summary of that section.
Last week, we read a story called James Ale. It sounds like the tale of a brewery founder, but it's actually about a boy who successfully petitions his City Council to build a park after his friend is hurt while playing in the street.
The best BME foldables listed the most vital parts of the story - James's friend Bobby is hit by a car; James meets the mayor and presents her with his petition to build a new park; the city Council agrees to build the park and now kids have a safe place to play.
The majority of projects had these important events. However, there were a few that listed events in the middle like James pointed at the map, or James gave a business card to the mayor, or James waved his hat.
This is kind of like summarizing the middle part of The Lord of the Rings with, "Gandalf rode a horse."
I'm sure that the kids will get better at this as I get better at this. As I learn new strategies for teaching them, so too will their skills grow.
At the very least, these kids will all be quite familiar with the hotdog fold by the time the year is out.
John Pearson is a third-grade math and science teacher in Dallas, Texas. He has degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University and Texas A&M, so most consider his math abilities adequate enough to teach nine-year olds. He is also the author of Learn Me Good (Lulu, 2006), a funny, fictionalized account of his first year in education. Read more at www.learnmegood.com
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Other readers' comments on this article:
It sounds like you have a really positive attitude. I always like to think of it that way with kids, as well: the more you learn about how to better teach them, the more they will learn, period. Learning together humbles us as teachers and makes the students appreciate that even their "all-knowing teacher" does not actually know everything. I think this also points out to students that learning continues throughout life and does not end when you leave school.
As someone who has worked a lot with 3rd graders (clinicals, student teaching, etc.- I seem to be destined for 3rd grade!), I can appreciate struggling to teach them a new concept. My issue was teaching 3rd graders apostrophe's to show possession. We would go over the concept; the students would complete relevant examples on the board for the whole class to learn from; we did examples from the workbook page... yet when the students completed the rest of the assigned grammar workbook page, I got numerous wrong answers! It's frustrating when they don't "get it", and I didn't know how to make them get it. It actually made me feel like a really ineffective teacher. I felt like the kids weren't learning and it was all my fault. I think this is normal so early on... I'm sure I'll get better with practice and will not feel so guilty every time students do not understand.
As you said, as we grow as teachers, our students understanding and skills will grow as learners too.
Keep up the hard work!
Heather
Posted by HeatherChristine on Nov 7, 2008 1:58 am