Wednesday 5 December 2012

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.


5 comments:

  1. To say I love this would be a complete understatement! This is awesome! My kids would love this so much!

    Thank you for sharing!
    http://teachingtoinspirein5th.blogspot.com/

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  2. Thanks Jennifer for the positive feedback! I will be sure to check out your blog! :)

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  3. Hey, do you happen to have the link to that video on Gangnam Style? I cannot find it. My students would enjoy it as well. Thanks for sharing! Great blog!

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  4. Sorry I cannot find the direct link.

    If you go to this website:

    http://www.abc.net.au/btn/

    and scroll down, you will see a small box that says "Gangnam Style". Click view now and it should open. I hope this helps! Thanks for the positive comments.

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  5. The video doesn't appear to be up anymore or in any searches but what an excellent idea!

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