How to teach primary school children

Synthesizing
Synthesizing within a text helps readers come up with the main idea. I do tons of modeling when teaching main idea, and I also use this graphic organizer:

Apologies for the poor quality – it’s an old photo! But what I like about this organizer is that it gets the idea across that there are lots of events (or facts) in a text, and we can use those ideas to come up with one main, core idea (like the core inside an apple supports the rest of the apple).
If you like the apple core analogy, click on the image below to download this graphic organizer for free:

Monitoring
When I teach students to monitor their comprehension, I integrate it with the skill of asking questions. I want my little readers to be consistently asking themselves, “Do I understand what is happening so far?” and using strategies when the answer is “no.”
During whole group readalouds, we can support students’ self-monitoring by planning for frequent turn and talks. Saying something like, “When readers go through a text, they pause every so often and ask themselves, ‘Can I retell the story/information so far?’ Let’s take a minute and see if we can retell the text so far to a partner.”
After the turn and talk, either model a retelling or construct a retelling with students. Then, ask students to evaluate their own retelling (that they did with a partner), on a scale of 1-3 (3 being the best, 2 being okay, and 1 being “needs work”). You might have students always giving themselves 3’s at first, but like many skills, this takes time and is developmental.
Visualizing
Visualizing is especially FUN to teach little ones! Read students a poem or part of a story without showing them any pictures. Have them sketch, on a sticky note or sheet of paper, what they are imagining. Eventually, teach students to add to their drawings or even create a set of 3 to depict the beginning, middle, and end of a story. For complete lessons on teaching students to create mental images, click here.