The Recipe For Synthesizing

What is your happy place? What comes to mind? More importantly, what made you decide that was your happy place? YOU SYNTHESIZED your thoughts! You combined your opinion of the place, the feelings it inspires, your connection with it, your prior experiences there, your idea of what being there now would be like, and your evaluation that the place you thought of is the happiest place!

Synthesizing is like an amazing recipe to put together all of your mental reactions to best interpret something. This reading strategy is what helps our students to fully comprehend a text. It is high level thinking, but we can break it down for our students! More specifically, Shane The Synthesizer can!

During my shared reading time, I use Comprehension Crew characters to model reading strategies for my students. Then we read interactively as they practice implementing the strategies themselves. Read more about that below!

Shane The Synthesizer

Shane The Synthesizer is a chef who has a talent for intentionally noticing his reactions to a text in order to combine everything together to have a comprehensive understanding! He loves to teach students how to do this too! An important aspect of Shane’s reading strategy is to form connections, thoughts, feelings, inferences, evaluations, schema, and ideas while reading. Students should already be comfortable doing these individual skills in order to use them in synthesizing. The best way to teach students to synthesize is to model it for them!

What is the Comprehension Crew?

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 life and in text. The character helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading.

Modeling While Reading

I read a book across 5 days about 10- 15 minutes a day during shared reading to model reading strategies for my students. Shane helps to model how to synthesize by showing that while we are reading we have a variety of reactions as we interpret the information and our thinking changes as we read more. While you are reading you viewpoint, prediction, or opinion on as aspect of the text might change because the new information you synthesize as you read influences your interpretation. Think back to your happy place, has it been the same place since you were little? Will it be the same happy place 20 years from now? Maybe, but either way you will be synthesizing new thoughts in order to determine if that is still your happy place or not.

As I read, I model intentionally noticing my thinking with Shane’s sentence frame and how I mix it all together. Then I pause as I read to allow students to try sharing their synthesis of the text information. As the story progresses and the thinking changes I demonstrate this to the students. This reading strategy takes several times of modeling and practicing in order for students to utilize it fully. I like to start simple, with pictures!

Practicing with pictures

In my Shane The Synthesizer resource pack, there are task cards for students to practice synthesizing. There are photograph task cards and short paragraphs on cards to practice. The task cards are set up in two parts. It is meant for the students to look at the first picture or read the first statement then synthesize that information. Next, they look at the next box and synthesize the new information given. How has their thinking changed? What elements of the photo/ text influenced this change in their “recipe”? It is important for students to practice synthesizing on a small scale to gain understanding and confidence in the skill. Often an entire text can be overwhelming to synthesize, especially for younger students! Differentiated passages on worksheets with scaffolded graphic organizers and questions are also included to help your students break down the different pieces of synthesizing!

Click here to see the mentor texts that I use to teach synthesizing!