Inside This Week’s Episode: Want your elementary students to get the most out of what they read? Then, teach them critical reading comprehension strategies like determining importance — I’ll show you how in today’s episode!

Students tend to think EVERYTHING they read is important.

But - the problem with trying to remember EVERYTHING you read is that you actually end up remembering very little.

Our brains can only retain so much information before it goes into overdrive, so it’s critical to help little brains, aka our students, develop strategies to strain out the nonessential information from the books that they read.

How do we do this? It should come as no surprise when I say that we need to explicitly teach them how.

We need to show students how to separate out the important, must-remember information from the interesting, but not essential details in a text.

Teaching students to determine importance will help set the foundation for students to be able to master other critical reading comprehension strategies like inferring and synthesizing that they will need to pull out from their reading toolbox as well.

In order to infer, students need to be able to pick up on the important details that serve as clues in making inferences. They need to determine importance first.

Synthesizing requires students to collect all the important details from and textual “bread crumbs” left throughout a book in order to come to a much deeper and complete understanding of the story. It starts with determining importance.

Let’s tackle this reading strategy together and break it down so that you can pass it on to your young readers.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to building reading comprehension is waiting!

Here’s a Snapshot:

• [02:44] Proficient readers who have mastered the determining importance reading strategy are able to decide, from everything on the page, what is most important to remember. Additional details provided by the author will make the text more interesting, but being able to extract the most important details will actually lead to better comprehension and retention of new information. Trying to remember everything means you’ll likely remember very little.

• [04:22] In fiction texts readers should remember important characters, events, and settings and how those story elements impact one another. I’ve got a few activities that work as great scaffolds to support your students in picking out these important pieces of information from the text. Plus - I’ve got a fun game that is perfect for setting the stage for this reading strategy - it’s sure to be a hit with your students!

• [9:22] Start with a read-aloud. Creating a simple T-Chart to outline essential information vs. interesting details is a simple concrete way to begin modeling this distinction.

• [12:38] A visual like the story mountain helps students classify the details that they determine as being important. It helps students to identify where on the story mountain their important information falls into. If it doesn't easily fall onto a specific part of the story mountain, it's likely not considered important, but rather an interesting detail.

• [13:37] With nonfiction text, model how to use the text structure to help identify important information. These structures include descriptive, sequential, compare and contrast, cause and effect, and problem and solution. I’ll share what you should look for in these structures to tie it back into the determining importance reading strategy.

• [16:40] The final piece to the puzzle is assessment of the strategy. How do you know if your students really are mastering the strategy of determining importance? I’ve got some top tips to consider!

Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode

EPISODE 54: 6 GREAT Reading Activities to Use With Nearly ANY Novel!

Reading Comprehension Strategies:

• EPISODE 41: Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies

• EPISODE 42: Reading Comprehension Instruction: How to Teach Making Connections

• EPISODE 47: Reading Comprehension Strategies: How to Teach Visualizing

• EPISODE 51: Reading Comprehension Strategies: How to Teach Making Predictions

Visual of Story Mountain:

Favorite Books to use for modeling Determining Importance (affiliate links):

• The Important Book by: Margaret Wise Brown (this is a great book to introduce the reading strategy)

• Love Will See You Through by Angela Farris Watkins

• The Stray Dog by Marc Simont

• Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say

Get access to all of my reading comprehension LINKtivities inside the LINKtivity® Learning Membership

Grab my FREE Determining Importance Bookmark below:

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