Determining+Importance

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 * "Determining Importance" - Chapter 7**

__Overview:__

All educators understand the struggle to decide what is meaningful and what is "fluff" in our everyday lives. We contemplate this on an everyday basis - in the classroom and outside in our personal lives. This chapter begins with Tanny McGregor describing a simple "light-bulb" moment from her own personal life. She tells readers about taking her children to the circus. As we all know, the circus is filled with things to see, hear, smell, taste, and experience - in short, it is a sensory overload! Now imagine you are a young child, where do you look first? What would you do? This is a simple lesson in determining importance.

Our students live in a fast-paced world that is filled with external stimuli. They are constantly bombarded with information from various sources. Although they may seem to be processing all of this stimuli just fine, this ability does not seem to transfer over to the area of strategic reading. Many students struggle to determine what is important when they are asked to listen or read a piece of informative or narrative text. In this chapter, McGregor provides some simple activities to introduce students to the process of "Determining Importance" and help them to perfect the idea so that it can improve their reading comprehension.

__Important Term To Remember__


 * Determining Importance** "The process of singling out what is meaningful and setting aside distractions within a text."

__Suggested Activities__


 * The Purse Activity**

1) Start the lesson with your purse/briefcase/backpack in hand. 2) Tell students that you are going to the gym/park/doctor's office after school and only want to bring the items that you **really** need. 3) Lay all items out for students to see, and ask students to take a few minutes and rank the items importance. 4) Discuss as a class why certain items are important and why they are not.

This lesson serves as an introduction to "Determining Importance".


 * Listening for Importance**

1) Play a song that has an important message or meaning. Ask students to listen closely to the lyrics. (You should replay the song multiple times if needed.) 2) Ask students to write down the important lines from the song - the lines that most relate to the overall meaning. 3) Discuss as a class why those specific lines were important to the overall meaning of the song. If those lines were taken out, what would the song lose?


 * The Story of an Artist/Writer/Musician**

(This is a lesson that I changed a bit from the book.)

1) Present the lifeworks of an artist, writer, musician, etc. to your class. 2) Have them view, read, or listen to select pieces from the beginning, middle, and end of their career. 3) Discuss how these pieces changed over time. 4) Read about the life and times of this person. 5) Talk about how the different experiences in the person's life affected their work. 6) Point out that what was relevant to the person at the time most likely had a profound effect on the person's work. 7) Discuss how this is relevant to your students lives. 8) Connect this idea to "Determining Importance".

__Personal Response__

I found this chapter to be very informative. I loved that McGregor gave practical activities to incorporate into the classroom. Although I only outlined a few of the activities above, I found all of them to be meaningful and relevant. This was a chapter that provided me with some practical advice and solutions for improving comprehension in my classroom.