Mentor Texts: Synthesize
Have you ever watched a movie or TV show and thought, “Wow that was an emotional roller coaster!” You were synthesizing probably every minute of watching! Synthesizing is what we innately do as we interpret what is going on around us. We combine our connections, thoughts, feelings, inferences, evaluations, schema, and ideas without even consciously realizing it.
Synthesizing is the key reading strategy to fully comprehend a text. It is also the most difficult to explain to students and guide them in doing. Synthesizing relies so heavily on personal interpretation and thoughts that it is best taught through modeling and guiding students through the process.
Make Synthesizing FUN!
Meet my good friend, Shane the Synthesizer! He is an expert chef who is known for combining the most amazing ingredients in the perfect way to produce a harmonized dish. Shane is also an expert on teaching students how to cook up their synthesis of a text! Read more about how I teach synthesizing!
Shane The Synthesizer is part of my Comprehension Crew instructional strategy. The Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, song, gesture, and prop that provide a concrete representation of the reading skill. These characters are used to model and reinforce each skill both in real life situations and in text. The character helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading. This teaching format helps you provide intentional, concrete, and meaningful experiences with synthesizing for your students. The reading character helps the skill COMES TO LIFE for the students and make it fun!
While Shane reads, he is consciously acknowledging his connections, thoughts, feelings, inferences, evaluations, schema, and ideas. Shane shows students how to mix them together to cook up their understanding of the text. Shane also provides them with the confidence for synthesizing texts.
Click on the picture above to see this resource pack. The product includes a model lesson to teach synthesizing any text and an abundance of synthesizing activities! Shane can start helping you teach evaluating today!
Teaching Synthesizing With Mentor Texts
Check out these books on Amazon:
- Salt In His Shoes
- Zen Ties
- The Great Fuzz Frenzy
- Baghead
- You Don’t Want a Unicorn
- Thunder Underground
- Eat Pete!
- Finding Winnie
- The Bear Ate Your Sandwich
- The Empty Pot
- Grandfather Twilight
- The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend
For synthesizing, I find it best to use books that inspire students to feel opinions about the characters and discover connections with the plot. High interest books are also ideal. Students need to be able to intentionally generate the ingredients in order to meaningfully synthesize it all together.
Read more about how I teach synthesizing here!
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