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Challenge
Initial Thoughts
Perspectives & Resources

What are some reasons to teach reading comprehension strategies in content-area classes?

  • Page 1: The Significance of Reading Comprehension
  • Page 2: Improving Reading Comprehension

What can teachers do to improve their students’ reading comprehension?

  • Page 3: Introduction to CSR
  • Page 4: Overview of the CSR Reading Strategies
  • Page 5: Preview Strategy
  • Page 6: Click and Clunk Strategy
  • Page 7: Get the Gist Strategy
  • Page 8: Wrap Up Strategy

How can reading comprehension strategies be implemented in content-area classes?

  • Page 9: Cooperative Learning
  • Page 10: Preparing the Class
  • Page 11: Materials for CSR
  • Page 12: Implementing CSR

Resources

  • Page 13: References & Additional Resources
  • Page 14: Credits
Wrap Up
Assessment
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What can teachers do to improve their students’ reading comprehension?

Page 7: Get the Gist Strategy

Boy reading at his deskDuring their reading, Mr. Dupree’s students also apply the Get the Gist strategy. The purpose of this strategy is to help students to identify main ideas as they read and, in doing so, to increase the likelihood that they will understand the text.

Get the Gist Strategy

Activities: identify main idea, restate main idea in ten words or fewer

The teacher explains how to restate the most important point of a section of text in one’s own words. The teacher assigns a passage for the student to read.

Students identify the most important idea in a section of text by using the following steps:

  1. Identify whether the paragraph is primarily about a person, place, or thing.
  2. Identify which person, place, or thing is being discussed.
  3. Identify what is being said about the person, place, or thing that the paragraph is principally about (i.e., identify the basic argument, angle, spin, or perspective that the section adopts regarding its topic).
  4. Restate the essence of the paragraph in a sentence containing ten words or fewer.

Click here to see the passage the students are reading.

Ecosystems: Making Connections

An ecosystem is part of the environment. In an ecosystem, big and small animals live in harmony with the rest of their natural world. A shoreline is one kind of ecosystem. Other kinds include deserts and rain forests. The parts of an ecosystem rely on each other for the health of the environment. That means that if one part is damaged, the balance of the whole can be upset. If this damage is big enough, the ecosystem might even collapse.

To help you understand ecosystems, you might imagine a spider-web. All of its threads are connected. If one part breaks or is torn, the rest of the web is weakened until it can be repaired.

Click here to view a sample learning log with the gists written in.

As with the Click and Clunk strategy, the teacher needs to determine how much text students should read before they stop to Get the Gist.

Click on the movie to watch some students implementing the Get the Gist strategy (time: 0:15).

/wp-content/uploads/module_media/csr_media/movies/csr_07.mp4

“Copyright © by the Texas Education Agency and University of Texas at Austin. All rights reserved” on all Licensed Materials.

View Transcript

Transcript: Get the Gist

Narrator: This group practices another reading strategy, Get the Gist. They work together to identify main ideas, develop a gist statement, and record it in their learning logs.

 

 

 

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