My Coach Learning Executive function and academic coaching, elementary through college

Taking notes you can actually use · step 5 of 7

Two sentences at the bottom

You will finish a page in under a minute.

Last step, and the cheapest one. In the strip along the bottom, write two sentences saying what the whole page was about. In your own words — not the teacher's.

QuestionsNotesSummaryWhat is psyn?What goes in?Photosynthesisplants make food from lightin: CO₂ + water + lightout: glucose + O₂Plants turn light, water and CO₂ into food and oxygen.

Two sentences, in your own words, the same day.

"In your own words" is the whole trick. Copying a sentence off the board takes ten seconds and teaches you nothing. Writing it yourself takes a minute and is the moment you find out whether you actually followed the lesson.

If you cannot write the summary, you did not understand the class — and it is far better to discover that on the day than the night before the test. A blank summary strip is not a failure, it is a question to bring to your next session.
Set a timer for one minute. Summarise today — any class, any subject — in two sentences without looking anything up.

When should the summary get written?

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