2nd grade - WWE2 question -Coach me a little

[2squared]

We are just beginning WWE2, and I need a little coaching. My dd can answer all of the content questions perfectly. She does OK with the summary questions. Then, she sometimes leaves out part of the two sentence narration.

 

I'm not sure how to coach her to include all the information from the summary questions. Does anyone have key questions to use to coach her? Yesterday we completed wek 3. Her summary was something like "Patsy decided she wanted a bath" without any of the radish seed info. She knew it all, but I think she is having trouble combining all the info (even though the previous questions lead her to all the info) AND she is thinking about how much she will have to write.

[Jen+4dc]

Do you think it's a summarization problem or that she doesn't want to write it all out? From what you said it sounds like she just doesn't want to write out her entire narration.

 

For my ds7 I only require 1 sentence of his narration to be used for dictation. He will often give me one sentence he knows is short and easy to write. Then, his second sentence will include the main info (or most of it). At this point I haven't worried about that, I'm more concerned that he learn to summarize and I feel like I'm still having to prompt too much.

 

If your dd can summarize well why not just require her to write one sentence for awhile then go back to both? Perhaps she'll do better knowing she doesn't have to write it all.

 

Just my 2 cents.;)

[Friederike in Persia]

When my ds gets stuck I just ask another question and he ususally gets it then. With time I've found that he can do it more and more on his own. SWB does suggest helping them with questions to do the summary.

As to the length, I tell my ds that he has to do 2/3 sentences. He still cuts those short when he doesn't want to write much that day, but the basic info is in there.

[Manamana]

We shifted gears a little with summarization - we're on week 20 or so. I asked dd8 to tell me what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end so she would try to cover the whole selection.

 

Our struggle is her sentences are so detailed I can't get them all written down in the space provided. It's hard for her to figure out what is summary and what is too much information. I guess that's why she get's so many opportunities to practice and figure it out.:)

[2squared]

We shifted gears a little with summarization - we're on week 20 or so. I asked dd8 to tell me what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end so she would try to cover the whole selection.

 

That's a great idea! I'll try this today.

 

Our struggle is her sentences are so detailed I can't get them all written down in the space provided. It's hard for her to figure out what is summary and what is too much information. I guess that's why she get's so many opportunities to practice and figure it out.:)

 

Excellent point. I've been using the white board for her narrations where the white space is endless. Maybe if I used the student pages it would help her to be more concise.

 

Thanks for the nuggets.

[anabelneri]

I found with my daughter (and this might just be a personality thing) that if I ask her the questions from the book, she doesn't do her narration as well as if I just ask her to narrate it for me. After we've gotten her narration written down I'll go back and ask her the summary questions, which she has no trouble with at all. So playing with the order of those might be an interesting experiment.

 

:)

Anabel

[Mom0012]

If my daughter leaves a lot out, I remind her that she is giving me a summary and that she needs to tell me all the most important things that happened. When I read her the questions that are supposed to guide her in summarizing, I make a point to tell her that those questions are there to help her figure out what is important so she can summarize the story.

 

With the story you are talking about, you could ask her what the problem was in the beginning of the story and why it was that Patsy wanted a bath.

 

Lisa

[Haiku]

I'm not sure how to coach her to include all the information from the summary questions.

 

I don't use the workbooks, just the textbook (so I choose my own selections and make up my own summary questions), but with my dd (also in WWE 2) I first make sure that I distinguish between this being a "details" passage or an "action" passage (you may not have gotten to that yet). If it's a details passage, I tailor my questions to make sure we talk about all the important details. If it's an action passage, I make sure we discuss the progression of events. Then I give her three sentences in which to list the most important details or the most important action of the story. Sometimes she goes over three sentences, and I'm fine with that if she's not just rambling. Our last narration was an action passage where four main things happened.

 

The young Grasshoppers and Crickets called the Harvestmen by their nicknames. The Harvestmen just said, "Well, they are young and don't yet know the names of their neighbors." One day a Walking-Stick asked one of the Harvestmen why they talked to the common folk of the meadow so much. The Harvestman said, "Well, we are kind-of common ourselves." After that the Walking-Stick never could decide whether the Harvestman was just too stupid to understand or too polite to gossip.

 

She got all of the major action into her narration. She needs to work on tying things together more smoothly, but we'll get to that. She gave this narration with no help from me, but we are on week 20-something, and we spent many weeks with me coaching her quite closely until she learned to give details and actions recognition in her narrations. With something like "Patsy decided she wanted a bath," I would ask leading questions about why she wanted to take a bath or what happened after she took a bath until all the major points of the passage had been covered. Then I would help my child summarize that and have her repeat it to me.

 

The narration questions do help the child remember the information, but I have found that, in the beginning, it's too much of a leap to ask the kids to use what was in the summary questions to form their narration. They need more guidance in how to transfer the information from answers to your questions to an independently constructed summary. If your dd's narrations are short because she doesn't want to have to write a lot, have her write the first sentence and you write the rest for her.

 

HTH.

 

Tara