Wednesday 16 October 2019

A fun way to teach summarising...

As mentioned in a previous post I recently attended a professional development day at the Pop Up Globe theatre. One of the activities that I formed the strongest connection to was the 5 sentence summary. This was taught to me in the context of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but even as we were working through each stage, I was thinking about the different contexts I could use this activity in the classroom. Today I did just that.

Our school-wide Inquiry for the term is Enterprise and Economics and for our Year 7/8 students this began by looking at early Maori enterprise. My learners worked used their smart searching skills to build on the foundations of the content knowledge I had gifted them. Their challenge was to make notes and record new vocabulary as they worked collaboratively to fill their knowledge ketes. To help strengthen their connections and understandings I challenged them to use their notes to help them summarise the key ideas in just 5 sentences. 

With our 5 sentence summaries complete I then challenged my students to add detail and make their thinking more succinct by turning each sentence into a 10 syllable sentence. My students absolutely loved this challenge. I know this because throughout the last part of this challenge 33/33 students were actively involved, contributing and engaged. 


No comments:

Post a Comment