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. 

Sakina's blog post

Alex's blog post

Victoria's blog post

Mele's blog post

Collaborating and Creating...

This week are capitalising on the power being able to 'create' can bring to our learning. For the last few weeks I have used my guided reading sessions to help my groups strengthen their connections to our inquiry focus of Space. To do this we have explored new vocabulary in context, identified the main ideas in the text, summarised the key points, searched for information, made connections between ourselves, other texts and the wider world, formed opinions and made evaluations. In addition to this I encouraged my more able learners to participate in dialogic learning conversations to help move their understanding to the next level. All strategies that are embedded into our reading program and help us make sense of new learning.

What excited me were the connections made during our visit to the Stardome. The conversations around the displays were rich, and the curiosities sparked during our reading time, explored further through the many rich questions that were asked of the experts. Luckily for us the Stardome educators were very happy to engage in these conversations over and over again, especially the ones that took place around the display of Yuri Gargarin parachuting onto the farmland. 

When I saw how much knowledge and content vocabulary my students were recalling and using without any prompting from me, I saw an opportunity to build on this further by providing an equally rich platform of opportunity to create DLOs that would enable them to share their new knowledge in an authentic way. So with that in mind, our literacy sessions this week are affording us the time to do this. 

We began today by recalling facts, skimming and scanning to find the information in our texts that supported our opinions, planning our storyboards (most groups have chosen to create an animation or an explainer movie), collaboratively writing scripts and purposefully using the content vocabulary needed to make connections to the learning in our inquiry lessons. The best part... every student was focused, engaged and on task! I can't wait to see the finished products.

Update: Here is an example of one of our finished DLOs...

Link to Sakina's blog post

Up-skilling and Empowering...

During this week's art lesson I noticed that a large number of my students did not appear to know how to blend colours. Wanting to make sure I taught these skills effectively and properly I reached out to Karen Ferguson for some guidance. I recalled her blogpost about her media experiments, the exact support I was after. What I wasn't aware of was that my class who are currently in Karen's tech group had asked to learn the exact same skills. As always Karen was more than happy to help out. So armed with my notebook I seized the opportunity for my own PD (I was focusing on Karen's language of instruction) and joined in with the learning. 

The students were so focused and extremely proud of the pictures they produced. From my perspective I now had a group of experts so I capitalised on this opportunity and asked them to share their learning. The success these students had experienced in their learning this morning empowered them to confidently support their peers to master the same skills. 

Each of these students rose to the challenge of being the teacher. I noticed that my 'experts' were modelling what they wanted their group to replicate, they were using the content language accurately and their instructions were clear and concise as you can see in the picture below.