On Thursday, SJ had his weekly speech therapy session. At Thursday's session, his therapist focused on finding the main idea and supporting details. She read him a paragraph. She had a visual aid that was a drawn ice cream cone. The ice cream cone was where SJ had to fill in the main idea. Each scoop of ice cream was where he had to insert a supporting idea.
This was the story: Even though we can clearly see the moon at night, it is about 238,857 miles away from the Earth! However, the moon seems very close by when you consider that the sun is about 92,955,817 miles away. Venus, the most visible planet, is 162 million miles away from Earth when it arrives at the furthest point along its orbit. Orion, the furthest constellation you can see without a telescope, is 32,600 light years away. A light year is the distance light travels within one year. One light year is equal to over five trillion miles!
She assisted SJ by circling and underlining the main idea and supporting details. SJ's ice cream cone contained a main idea of the distance from Earth and planets, sun and moon. He then had four "scoops" on his cone. These scoops had the following supporting details: Orion is the furthest, Venus is 162 million miles away, Sun is 92,955,817 miles away and the Moon is 238,857 miles away.
She reported that SJ did fairly well with this activity. I forgot to tell her that outer space is a huge interest to him, so maybe that helped to keep his attention.
She did another story on sharks using the ice cream cone visual. She said SJ was able to find the main idea, but he had a little more difficulty finding the supporting details. She needed to prompt him to return to the story and underline the details.
I felt the visual aid she used was a great way to illustrate to SJ how the supporting details are as important as the main idea. (Who would just want a plain cone without any scoops of ice cream?) I will use this strategy when we start our summer comprehension work books.
No comments:
Post a Comment