Incredibly Shrinking Notes

The third strategy we used in summarising was "Incredibly Shrinking Notes" (the other ones were One Dollar Sentences and Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then).

For our example in class, we watched a video from Behind the News about Gangnam Style. I thought I would pick a topic that students are interested in so that they could learn what Gangnam Style is actually about since it is the new craze. 

We watched the video first and students jotted down all the facts they could remember from the video.  We came up with a list of ten different facts.

Next, we began to shrink our notes. As a class, we selected the five most important facts that we thought reflected the main idea of the video. This proves to be a challenging activity as some students struggle to decide facts that are related to the main idea and those facts that are supporting details. 

And finally, we created one sentence to reflect what we believed the main idea of the video was by taking two to three of our facts and placing it into a sentence.

And that, folks, is how you incredibly shrink your notes.