Taking notes is a foundational skill that will accompany your student through their entire educational journey and beyond. Even though there is no right way of taking notes, it is important to learn how to extract relevant and pertinent information from a text in a neatly organized, concise manner. This takes practice. As students are encouraged to practice over time the art of capturing the most important details from their reading, they will begin to recognize how the intricacies of a story fit into a larger picture. This is precisely how a Habit of Being is established.
When readers take note of character development, trace a setting, and watch a plot thicken, they are learning more than just the skill of recording facts, they are actually beginning to realize the potential of storytelling. Teaching students to dig into a story, to do the work of reading for meaning, enables them to discover how language has the power to communicate significance. Learning to take notes helps to lay the foundation for rich, clear, and organized writing.
Some might argue, when faced with a classroom of 30 students, or even when faced with one student sitting at a kitchen table stubbornly refusing to write, that teaching from a textbook that tells the student what to learn is an easier method than pulling teeth trying to nurture the independent skill of note taking. We would argue that learning to extract information from a story trains students to do the hard work of, not only attending to the details of reading, but more importantly to develop the skill of integrating knowledge into life outside of the book.
As students discover the details and framework that make a story great, they will apply this new-found knowledge to broader academic pursuits in all subject areas.
~Kimberly
