Summarising a Video Clip

I've posted before about One Dollar Sentences and how much I love that strategy for almost any subject area or topic.

Today we did a group activity on summarising and it was amazing to see the level of engagement from all the students. Students were placed in mixed ability groups and given the task to watch a brief video clip from Behind the News. While they watched the video clip, they were to jot down the key words from the clip. 

As soon as the clip ended, students were given five minutes in their groups to create a "one dollar sentence" to summarise the main idea of the video clip. Today, every word was worth five cents, thus a one dollar sentence needed to have exactly twenty words in it. Groups were awarded point for have twenty words exactly, having correct grammar and summarising the key facts. Students' competitive spirits were ignited and the race was on. 

We did this activity a few times with different video clips and it was great to see the improvement in the sentences and summarising. Some students began with summarising in two sentences and then were able to restructure their words to ensure it was only one sentence. Here are some examples: