AVReading

This month, we will continue with our year long goal of examining the Common Core State Standards for Reading and how we can do things within our classrooms to emphasize them.  This month we will look at the second standard, which reads as follows: “Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.” Again, I will point out that our conceptualization of reading has become much more complex.  As evidence, the second standard alone seems to cover most of what we used to consider to be reading-- which means that the other nine standards of common core are going to ask readers to do more and understand more of texts.   Standard two is basically asking the reader to demonstrate three skills:  identifying the main idea or theme, explaining how that idea is developed, and summarizing the supporting details used to develop that theme.  For our purposes here, I will focus helping students dete...