Comments

The "SWB and so" sounds like a great tool. Can you show us a picture of it? e.g., can you scan it in to your computer and post it on the blooki? If the plotline the teacher wants them to do is also in some organized format, can you show us that, too? It would be much appreciated - thanks.

-- LindaP - 23 Oct 2006

I found a few things:

Does Christopher's chart look like this? http://www.allamericareads.org/lessonplan/strategies/after/somebody.htm

The person who, it seems, developed this reading strategy: "We soon discovered "Somebody Wanted But So" statements and "Context Clues" (both researched by Dr. Kylene Beers of the University of Houston)" http://www.ncacasi.org/enews/articles_dec03/somebody_wanted

So I did a search for Dr. Kylene Beers and Somebody Wanted But So, and I got this: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=Dr.+Kylene+Beers+Somebody+Wanted+But+So&btnG=Search

Sorry if this is information overkill, but I am too tired to whittle all this down to something more manageable.

Anyway, I really like this idea - I think it's great. I might suggest this to one of my kids' teachers. I will also introduce this directly to my kids - for when they need to analyze fiction (book reports, standardized tests, etc.).

-- LindaP - 23 Oct 2006

Thanks for the great information. I found this .pdf that might be of interest. Somebody Wanted But So It is a teacher's guide for introducing the Somebody Wanted But So method and the final two pages are (I think) a handout for students to fill out as they work through it. What a great way to help reader's figure out and distill conflict in fiction.

-- LynnGuelzow - 23 Oct 2006

Linda P

I'll ask him if he's brought it home.

I'm sure it's the one Lynn came up with.

[pause]

yup, that's it.

Thanks for the links!

I like Ms. Coulson's innnovation, which is the addition of the word "and" (or, at least, that's what Christopher heard - it could be his innovation, I suppose...)

Somebody

Wanted

But

And so....

Beautiful.

That could be a haiku about life.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

Christopher's ELA teacher is teaching them how to summarize - which I've come to think, based in my own life, is incredibly important.

It looks like there is also a serious research base supporting this idea.

Christopher told me this yesterday, but I didn't quite follow. He said his teacher was teaching them how to summarize without restating all the words - or by finding which words you want to quote (I didn't follow....)

Obviously this assignment is an established summary assignment for narrative fiction.

Here's a post on different kinds of summary from another teacher:

There are many different after-reading activities teachers can use to reenforce comprehension of what they just read.

Scales help students make better sense of the texts by "making comparisons, recognizing contrasts, draw conclusion, and distinguish between facts and opinions" (139).

Somebody Wanted But So is a summary strategy. Have students read a story and decide who the somebody is, what the somebodywanted, but what happened to keep something from happening, and so, finally, how everything worked out.

Other good after-reading strategies are Retellings, an oral summary based on elements, It Says -- I Say, making inferences, and Strategy Snapshots, using symbolic sketches, finding most important words andwriting reflections.

I'm going to have to take a look at these others and see if one of them might work as well for nonfiction as this one does for fiction.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

I heard from my friend whose children are in one of the best private schools in the country.

Her 6th grader is spending hours talking about how the character in a novel feel.

Hours and hours apparently.

This assignment is far better than that.

To approach a novel from a psychological standpoint is to erase its craft & convention — which is already erased by narrative conventions, which "self-erase" (sounding pretentious there - I can't remember the terminology for "transparent narrative." Oh. The language is "transparent narrative." I think.)

Anyway, conventional popular fiction tends to be transparent; it tends to be written as a window-on-the-world.

This assignment tells students that a narrative work is a work; it is a construction.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

Kylene Beers at Learning Point.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

teachers.net on summary

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

SWB And so... in pdf file

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

The teacher post on summary is quite good:

Summarizing requires essential skills---finding the main idea, sorting through relevant and irrelevant details to determine importance, paraphrasing. On the Taxonomy, it is at the comprehension level, but it incorporates so many comprehension level sub-skills that it is very high level processing. In order to really understand what we read, we need to be able to summarize. If we can't summarize it, we don't comprehend it. A test I always use for myself in terms of understanding a research article is this exact thing. As I go back and try to explain what I've read, if I do a retelling, I don't understand; if I can summarize, I do.

[pause]

Oh, and the bad news: Summarizing is very difficult to teach!

I've now read Bloom's taxonomy, but I can't "use" it.

I gather that the taxonomy isn't "sequential" - it isn't like Piaget's successive stages of intellectual growth. (If I'm wrong, I hope someone will chime in.)

However, I would have trouble applying the taxonomy to the "skill" of summary.

I'd say that summary involves all 6 levels.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

This is interesting:

I've found it interesting that while the Somebody, Wanted, and But statements are easy for my students, the So statement uncovers comprehension problems. There's a cause and effect disconnect there that we're working on.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

I love this:

I heard a children's author a couple of year's ago who uses this frame to plot out her basic story line.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006

on teaching summarizing of nonfiction:

I have found that using plot for teaching summary of fiction, and using main idea and major supporting details to teach summary of nonfiction the best route.

I used to do something a little more complicated than this, though I have no idea whether it was or wasn't a good idea.

I would have everyone read an essay from the Norton Anthology.

Then, as I recall, I'd ask them to find the "Thesis" — meaning the central argument. (We spent some time talking about the fact that virtually any statement is also an argument, and that all nonfiction writing is "persuasive" if only in the sense that the author wants you to come along for the ride...

The more important aspect of what we did, however, was that each student wrote down, for each paragraph in the essay, the thesis statement of the paragraph, or the implied thesis if there was no explicit statement.

Each student also, iirc (this part is hazy) identified the segue to the next paragraph.

This was my Johns Hopkins class. Twelve year old kids.

Boy, looking back, they were a brainy lot.

As I recall, they could do this fairly easily. I also remember this exercise as being not so much of a slam dunk that they weren't learning anything from doing it....

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Oct 2006