One of the critical Common Core skills is to summarize the main ideas contained in a text. Writing a crisp summary depends upon distinguishing key ideas from details. This month, edWeb community, Instructional Strategies for Reading Improvement K-8, hosted a webinar providing strategies for helping students improve their abilities to write and understand the components of summaries.
Students need to be learning 2,000 – 3,000 words a year to keep up with expected levels of vocabulary growth. Teaching 10 words a week is only going to add up to 300-400 per school year. The major way to grow vocabulary is to teach students a process for figuring out what words mean as they confront unfamiliar words in text.