Recalling Details (The 5 W's)

The school that I work at runs fluid groupings for reading and maths, and we have now just started it for writing (I will keep you posted on how that goes!). For those who aren't familiar with fluid grouping, students are divided into groups based on their academic ability in that subject and more specifically the topic being studied. So, as an example, all grade 5 and 6 students are grouped initially based on start up tests on, let's say, maths. There are six grade 5/6 teachers, so there will be six groups. Then, if the topic being studied is multiplication, and some students need more help or others need more extension, students can move between the group based on the teachers discretion. Although there are some negatives to this system, I think that from a teachers point of view, it is very helpful to have students in closer ability ranges as it is easier to teach to a more targeted group. It also allows the students to receive more targeted instruction at their level. 

So, after all of that, this year I have been given the lowest reading group. These students are in grade 5/6 but are working at a much lower level. This has been a challenging few weeks for myself as I am needing to re-evaluate my teaching practice. I have been working a lot with the grade 1/2 teachers to get ideas and direction of how to run my reading lessons. 

This week, we are working on recalling details from a story/text. Although the rest of the grade 5/6 teachers are working at a higher level, I have modified this topic to focus on the 5W's (who, what, when, where, why). Hopefully this works for my students. I have created a 5W anchor chart for this week and it includes our learning goal and success criteria.

I have created some very scaffolded activities for the students this week on the 5Ws with their guided reading books. Essentially, like the anchor chart says, I just want the students to understand the 5Ws and how to find them in a text. 

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.

Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then

SWBST as referred to by my students. One of the first summarising strategies on our success criteria.

Take any narrative and have students try to fill in a SWBST chart for their narrative. This was first shown to me by my colleague Shane and it works for all skills levels too. 

I've been explicitly teaching this strategy in my whole class focus lessons and it is used as a follow up task also. Here is a picture of our class poster that gets updated for each new narrative we read. 

We also completed this strategy on the interactive whiteboard:

Summarising

A wonderful idea shown to me by my teaching and learning coach Mrs Kenely. Please check out her blog...she is fabulous!

For my unit on "summarising" (for those readers from Canada and the USA, "summarising" is spelt with an "s", not a "z" in Australia... yes, it took some getting used to) in reading, I created an anchor chart as seen below.

 

A nice clear visual for the students with a definition of summarising, a specific learning focus for my class, a success criteria based on strategies we will work on throughout the unit, and a summary of learning area for our share time. 

One of my favourite parts of the poster is the "Summary of Learning" section. At the end of each reading session, one student from each of my reading groups writes what they have learnt that day on a sticky note, presents it to the class and places it on our chart. These sticky notes can then be used for teacher formative assessments based on student self-evaluation. 

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:

One Dollar Sentences

A short one but a good one!

I learnt about this while I was in teacher's college as a strategy to help students explain an idea/concept/etc. in a short sentence. I've used this strategy in high school and now I often use it in primary school and students find it exciting and a challenge. 

It is called a $1 sentence and each word is worth 10 cents. Students are asked to respond to a question or summarise a passage in a one dollar sentence (ten words only!). 

Try it out!!! Trust me it is wonderful!