Today was the third day of my unit. I noticed that the students were having a lot of trouble with reading comprehension last Friday. I used one of Dr. Kist's activities from class today in my lesson and I think the students really enjoyed it. I did the "meet and greet" activity in which the students write their names on one side of a paper and then on the other I had them write: 1. Their predictions about what will happen to the narrator in the story; and 2. One question that they had about the reading so far. Then they introduced themselves and switched papers five times. I think this really helped the students make predictions and use critical thinking skills about the reading. They also seemed to have a lot of fun doing the activity. I was able to assess the students because I collected the papers with their predictions and questions. I saw many trends in the questions and we addressed them later on in the class.
I also did a summarizing activity in the beginning of class, which worked really well when I put students into groups. I selected significant passages from the text and gave each group a passage to paraphrase. Then, I had a member from each group read the passage and tell the class their paraphrase. I think this activity really helped students understand the more difficult passages from the text and it also served as a summary of the first part of the story.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow because my supervisor is coming to visit. I'm also going to show the you-tube
rap video to summarize the story of "The Pit and the Pendulum."
I'm glad to hear that the reading strategy was helpful in your classroom. It was a good idea to collect their work. Even if you check for progress, I feel this is a way for students to work harder. Whenever something is collected, students seem to work harder on the assignment, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteFor summarizing, I was going to try an activity where students read to a specific point in a story. After the point students would then summarize that point in a sentence. Students would do this three times based on the stopping points designed by the teacher. In the end, students will create a summary out of all of the sentences they completed. You could also try this for a summary activity. By breaking it up, students don't have to think so hard on the whole piece at once, but in sections.