November Unit Plan: Synthesizing Reading
A flexible smorgasboard of activities and strategies to help students synthesize what they read to come to a deeper understanding.
Remember the Moving Writers Community Wish List I won’t stop talking about?
One of the top requests was for a unit that would teach students how to synthesize in reading.
Ask and ye shall receive.
This unit is a little bit different than usual because, while still skill-based, it could be taught as a single unit OR pulled apart so you have a variety of synthesis lessons to sprinkle throughout the other units you teach.
Tell me more about synthesis…
Synthesis is complicated and necessary. It’s the thing that enables students to go from simply decoding to being able to identify and articular big ideas and themes of a text.
To synthesize, we add together thoughts from throughout a text OR pull together thoughts from multiple texts to come to a higher level of truth and understanding.
When readers synthesize, they are pulling together “summary or partial retelling” and “their own thoughts, experiences, opinions, interpretations and connections to generate a new, and bigger idea -- it’s going beyond the text” (The Classroom Nook).
Synthesis is generative. It’s more than a sum of its parts.
There are three potential outcomes when we synthesize:
New Understanding — we understand more than we understood before.
Deeper Understanding — we understand on a deeper level.
Changed Understanding — our understanding changes
But we need strategies to help students’ brains go through the motions of pulling together different pieces into a common understanding.
And that’s where this unit comes in. Here are the strategy slides with links to reproducibles!
