Today, J tried to summarize "The Holly and the Evergreen", an Enki nature story and once again, she was retelling me the story. She was doing a good job with that but she was not "summarizing" the story.
A light bulb came on for me as I realized she probably need an example of what I mean by "summarize". Anyway, I told her how I would summarize the story and then she got frustrated and said that she can't summarize.
More light bulbs came on for me; the story is too long and I really need to break it down for her. As I was just thinking about this, Prime wants me to read him "Best Friends for Frances". He loves Frances books and I 'm grateful that Enki recommended this series of books. Anyway, I read them the first page and I asked J to summarize and she was doing the same thing-"retelling me what she heard". She insisted on trying couple times to "summarize" but still not quite right.
I give her an example and told her when I say "summarize", I mean tell me "the gist of what is being said or what is it really saying." I give her a few examples and then J tried again with another couple of pages from the Frances book.
This time, she "summarized" every time! She put it in her own words and give me the gist of what she heard! YEAH!
J said she is glad I demonstrated and showed her and that I'm a good "home school teacher". :-)
So I think we had a break through on this. We will try again with a short story tomorrow and see how it goes.
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