“I don’t know why I didn’t do well on this test. I studied hard for it, but I must have studied the wrong things.”Have you heard your child say this? If you haven’t yet, chances are that you will someday. While your child’s teacher may spend some class time teaching study skills, it most likely is not enough to help many students acquire, organize, synthesize, remember and use information. All of these are skills that your child may not have developed yet but needs in order to do well on academic tasks, including taking a test, and in order to succeed in school and life. Research unequivocally shows that study skills are related to academic performance. Equally as strong is the research evidence indicating that these skills can be learned. It may be hard to identify which specific strategies are the best in terms of optimizing students’ learning and maximizing their retention of the material. However, we know that whatever strategies your child uses, they must be designed to help him cut large amounts of material down to a manageable size in order for him to understand and remember the main ideas in all of his subject matter material, as well as integrate information into an understandable whole. If he learns strategies that will help him understand, integrate and remember information, he will do well with academic tasks in all of his subjects, including his performance on tests

This lesson plan provides step-by-step instruction on how to successfully use three strategies that have been proven to help students understand, integrate and retain the main ideas in material they’re reading. In addition, the strategies prepare students for taking tests.

Learn

Step one in the process of teaching students study skills involves a strategy for helping them select important information for constructing a main idea and then summarizing the main ideas of text. With the About Point strategy, students examine each paragraph and identify the topic or the “About.” They then decide what “Point” the author is making in the paragraph. Combining the “About” and the “Point” is a simple way for students to identify the main idea in a section or a paragraph of text. They can then turn their “About Point” for each paragraph into a statement that can be the basis for a summary.

Click on the following link to access an About Point template. Then ask your child to select a piece of non-fiction text that he has to read for a school assignment or would like to read for enjoyment. Before you begin working on the strategy, click on the second and third links to access a text, “The Deadly Cobra,” and a completed About Point template for that text. You can use the completed strategy as a model for helping your child complete the strategy on his own. Also, if your child can’t think of a piece of text to use for this activity, you can allow him to use the cobra text.

• About Point Template

• The Deadly Cobra

• The Deadly Cobra – About Point Exper Response

Now, help him examine each paragraph in his own text, or “The Deadly Cobra” text, and write down on the template the “About” and the “Point” and a statement that can be made from each “About Point.”

Practice

Step Two in the process of teaching students study skills involves a strategy called About Point Notetaking, which is an extension of About Point and is used to help students study. The strategy provides students with a simple structure for taking notes on a piece of text by identifying the main ideas in each section of the text and then selecting the important supporting details. When students finish taking notes on the assignment, they can use the structure or template for studying by folding over the right side of the pager and covering everything except the Abouts (topics). They test themselves by seeing if they can remember the Point and the details for each About.

Click on the link below to access the About Point Notetaking template. In order to practice this strategy, your child can either use the text that she chose for the previous step (About Point), or she can select another text. A third option is to use “The Deadly Cobra” text which you can access by clicking on the second link. In any case, you will help your child take notes on the reading assignment by writing down the About, the Point, and supporting details for each paragraph or section. You can click on the third link to access a completed About Point Notetaking template for “The Deadly Cobra.” As was the case with the previous step, you can use the completed template to model the use of the strategy for your child.

• About Point Notetaking Template

• The Deadly Cobra

• About Point Notetaking – Expert Response

When your child has completed the About Point Notetaking strategy for a text, help her to use the structure for studying. Cover everything except the About for each section and see if your child can tell you the Point and the details. If she is having difficulty doing that, uncover the Point for each section and test her on the details.

Use

Step Three in the process of teaching students study skills involves the use of a strategy that provides a “big picture” of the concepts or ideas being studied and their relationships to one another. The Structured Overview (SO) is a pictorial/visual representation that presents a hierarchical outline of the information being studied with the most inclusive, or superordinate, concepts subsuming subordinate ones. Relationships among concepts are shown by connecting lines.

If a student can construct a Structured Overview for the material that he is studying, it means that he has processed the information deeply so that he can see the connections and synthesize the information, thereby allowing for full comprehension of the text. After constructing the overview, he can use it for review.

You will help your child construct a Structured Overview for the text that he used in applying the About Point Notetaking strategy. But, before your child constructs his own SO, click on the link below to access a Structured Overview for the text, “The Deadly Cobra.” Look at this example together and go over the process of constructing a visual representation for material. The cobra SO shows the three ways in which cobras are deadly. The type of animal under study – Cobras – is listed at the top (superordinate concept) with the ways in which it is deadly – venom, mobility, and prey – branching out beneath it (subordinate concepts). Finally, examples are listed underneath each form of deadliness.

Through a discussion of this process, your child will come to see that a visual representation of material, such as this SO, will help him to understand and remember why the cobra is considered to be deadly.

After you and your child have examined the cobra Structured Overview and discussed the process of constructing a SO, your child is ready to practice making a Structured Overview for his own text that she can then use to review and study for a test.

• Structured Overview – Expert Response