The Forest And the Trees: Helping Readers Identify Important Details in Texts and Tests

It certainly helps me greatly to learn how to select which details to use by some different levels of importance to go with Emily's first book entitled, Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Retelling, learning how to summarize passages and to paraphrase. The summarizing passages, the paraphrasing, and the selecting important details to use are very important skills for all students to have for their education for life, but those skills were not taught sufficiently, at least for me in my school education years ago. I am using those 2 books of Emily Kissner to work with Susan Wise Bauer's wonderful book entitled, Well-Educated Mind, A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, to fill in what I missed. All those three books are strongly recommended!And I would like to add that I am currently using Susan W. Bauer's Writing with Skill, Level 1 (both student text and instructor's text) and those two books of Kissner will be very helpful for me working on Writing with Skill.

Emily Kissner's second book is a gem. The title suggests that the book is about details, but that just scratches the surface. It's really about developing inferential thinking skill in our intermediate and middle grade students. Inference is a dance, moving seamlessly between the details and the overall gist of a text. Emily has several quick assessments she has developed to target the skills a child may be lacking, so it's easy to see where you need to instruct. Then she presents several real-life scenarios and lessons to show how to teach the skills. She even breaks down different inference skills in both fiction and non-fiction texts. I used this book for both my intermediate class and a middle grade intervention group with great success. If you only buy one book on teaching inference, this is it!

Once again, Emily Kissner has hit a home run with all the bases loaded. This gave me a new way to look at details, and how students process them and use them. It also gave me a practical approach to implement a solid instructional sequence to teach students how to notice details and use them in their writing. I will continue to be a big fan of anything Ms. Kissner publishes!

As a teacher, I look for books that combine practicality with vision. The Forest and the Trees definitely meets that criteria. Full of everyday tips, and ideas that can be adapted to classrooms from third to eighth grade, this is a book I turn to often. For helping students to recognize the relationships among ideas, this is a perfect resource.