Monday, October 22, 2007

Skimming & Scanning

Does skimming and scanning come naturally . . . or does it need to be taught?
Posted by at

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been teaching scanning to grade 4 kids as part of a local history project. It takes 5 minutes. I teach 2 students as a team, one with the mouse 1 on the scanner.

John Jaques
Technology Integrator
Litchfield School Dapartment
Litchfield, Maine

October 22, 2007 at 11:13 AM
Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain said...

Most kids need to be taught skimming & scanning, which is complicated by the fact that by grade 8, most think they know how. I am doing this now, in fact - with the old post-it notes method (new with Stickies) and tried-and-true reading tricks (looking for text format clues, prepreading questions for keywords, you know...). Also, use command-F on sites to help with the skim and teach kids to scan for punctuation marks to help them push through long test passages. Does it work? Depends. On font, line height, column width, paper color, how much they are not going to be embarrassed by covering up half of the text.
By the way - I don't think highlighting is very helpful. I like circling with a pencil or rewriting onto a stickie (real or virtual).

October 22, 2007 at 4:26 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)