photo: ARACELOTA via photopin cc

It's been estimated that 90% of all paragraphs contain the main idea in the opening sentence. This fun exercise, inspired by the popular competition show DANCING WITH THE STARS, divides the class into teams, determined to verify or negate the accuracy of this assertion, in relation to a given passage.

Here's how to CARRIE out the activity and LENgthen the pleasure, while avoiding BRUNO-bombastics.

Find a passage with at least eight paragraphs. Make copies—one for each member of the two groups. Ideally each group will have six-to-eight members. Three students will serve as judges. And two students will be the "stars." If the class has more than 21 students, have the remaining students answer these questions while the other groups are doing their assignments.

• What is the value of knowing the main idea of a paragraph?
• Where can the main idea be found?
• When does it make sense to skim the rest of the paragraph once the main idea has been identified?
• What kinds of reading material should never be skimmed, but rather should be read very carefully, word for word?
• What is the advantage of placing the main idea in the first sentence of a paragraph?
• What is the advantage of placing the main idea in the last sentence of a paragraph?

Have Team 1 read the first four paragraphs and decide, as a team, what is the main idea in each paragraph. They will write their four ideas on flip chart paper.

Have Team 2 read the last four paragraphs and collaborate regarding the main idea for each of their paragraphs. They will also write the four main ideas on chart paper.

Two students (ideally, one boy and one girl) will be "the stars." They will read only the first sentence in each paragraph (the "starts") and will write each one on chart paper. (There will be eight sentences altogether.)

Appoint three judges. (For fun, you could seat them as a panel with the DWTS judges' names in front of each seat.) While they wait for the main ideas to be recorded by the teams and by the stars, the judges can read the passage. They should not be asked to determine what the main ideas are--they should merely read. Have three paddles with numbers on them for each judge to hold up: 5 would mean "barely the same," 8 would mean "close," and 9 or 10 would mean "virtually the same."

Team 1 begins by telling the judges what the first paragraph's main idea is. The "stars" come next. They give their main idea--viz., the start of the paragraph for the first paragraph.

The judges score how well the stars did with their main ideas. If their first-sentence ideas are close to what the teams wrote, after reading the full paragraph, the judges will award an 8. If the two main-idea presentations are not at all alike, the judges must give a 5. And if the two presentations are virtually the same, the scores will be 10.

Continue with the team reports, the stars reports of "starts," and the scoring until all eight paragraphs have been covered.

Depending on the judges' scores, lead a discussion regarding where the main idea is typically found and whether or not students can count on finding it in the first sentence of a paragraph. Continue the discussion, using the answers to questions in Step 1. (If a team worked on these questions, have them provide a report.)

Segue from reading the main idea to using the main idea. Divide the class into three teams and have each develop a one-paragraph letter to one of the three DWTS judges. Use this as the main-idea sentence:

Our class worked a "Dancing with the StarTs" reading exercise.

If you think your students would like the attention, notify the local media of the exercise and the subsequent letters that were written to the actual judges. Here's the address:

Dancing With the Stars
c/o CBS Television City
7800 Beverly Blvd.
Bungalow #1
Los Angeles, CA 90036

And, if the letters are mailed, re-invite the media to do a story about the responses received if and when Len, Carrie Ann, and Bruno reply!

Marlene Caroselli, Ed.D. writes extensively about education topics. Among her books on the subject are 500 CREATIVE CLASSROOM CONCEPTS and THE CRITICAL THINKING TOOL KIT.



Teaching Tips: Grammar Games to Deliver Fun and Confidence

Teaching Tips: Putting the 'Fun' in Reading Fundamentals

In the spring of 2012, a group of English Language Arts educators from Franklin, Massachusetts launched a highly successful middle school reading program around THE HUNGER GAMES. In this five-part special series, the teachers who orchestrated the whole-school read will detail, step-by-step, this year’s initiative. Parts I and 2 focused on how the team made this year’s book selection, THE HOBBIT, and encouraged student participation. Part 3 looked at some unexpected pitfalls the group faced based on book selection. Now, in Part 4, Mary Cotillo, Erin O’Leary, and Kathleen McNeice talk about how they decided which readers were granted passage to see the film adaptation—and why some participants will not be going.

Bilbo Baggins was swept into a grand adventure without having to prove his burglary skills to the dwarves who employed his services. So, a savvy, finagling middle schooler may inquire, why do I have to prove anything to you? Why should a voluntary activity have a qualifying quiz?

For the straight-A, join-everything, honesty-is-a-virtue kids, you are right. They don’t need it. But let’s think about the hobbits. As much as we love books and reading and fully expect others to match our enthusiasm, we are also teachers of early adolescents. And realists. And we know that if kids catch wind of an opportunity to leave school to watch a movie, they’re going to be lining up. To maintain legitimacy it becomes necessary for students to demonstrate that they earned the reward. After all, this isn’t a school-wide film viewing initiative. It’s a school-wide literacy initiative.

And here’s another thing we learned this year. When choosing a book that leans a tad toward the more challenging end of the spectrum, having a qualifying quiz gives students an opportunity to feel pride and success. They get to feel good when they know the answers, bask in the congratulations of the teachers handing them their permission slip, and maybe even indulge in a heel click or two on their way back to class.

Call it reaping, call it riddling, call it whatever fits your book best—but make sure you do it. We were clear from the outset (okay, MOST of us were clear from the outset. See Part 3, Goblin Caves and Spider Webs) that this is a celebration of the book. And when you have book nerds running this thing, you’ll want to be sure that everyone is there because they, too, read and loved the book.

We brainstormed a list of seventy or so questions and vetted them in our classroom after school. If all four of us couldn’t agree on the answer, or recall it quickly enough, it was out. We also made sure the questions were from different parts of the book (I already admitted the book nerd thing). The more questions you can create, the better. Choose three questions per sheet, require the kids to answer 2 out of 3 correctly, and there you go.

When will you conduct your winnowing? Our prior experience was to go to the students in the classrooms. This proved difficult and time consuming. Students were missing—at band, activities, or getting extra help. This also took us away from the students that needed OUR help during this time.

So, this year, we made the better decision to have the students come to us. And what better time for a captive audience than during their lunch? It did require giving up our quiet lunch time to query these Tolkien enthusiasts; however, it was well worth the sacrifice when you see students ten deep in front of you waiting for their turn. We had to push students into the cafeteria to eat their lunch first so we could stagger the masses.

We had ten different versions of our quiz for the hobbits to choose from. A frequent question was “What if I don’t pass?” We encouraged everyone, not allowing any student to set themselves up for failure. We told them, “If you read the book, have confidence that you will be successful!”

We also knew that everyone wanted to be included.

With that in mind, the quizzes were answered at separate tables with no opportunity for sharing answers. There will always be the students that didn’t do the work but don’t want to miss out on the fun. We cheerfully asked everyone before they picked their quiz when they finished the book. The majority of the kids cannot help but be honest. If they said they weren’t done we didn’t let them take the quiz. This is ultimately better for the student since one question was about the end of the book. In order to pass the student would have to get the other two correct. We simply told these kids to finish the book and come back.

When they finished, the moment of truth was at hand. And believe me, these kids were nervous. Some prayed. Some closed their eyes while others bounced nervously from foot to foot. Honestly, they had worked hard and needed to feel that it was all worth it. You are that litmus test. If you are enthusiastic, chances are they will be too. To every student that passed came a heartfelt congratulations and the reward in the form of a movie poster (thank you, Warner Brothers!) and a permission slip to join us on the first part of our adventure, a private screening of the movie at the local theater. In addition, kids got high fives, atta boy/girl, woo hoos and pats on the back and everyone walked away feeling that they had won the race.

Not everyone will pass.

First, let me reassure you that we’re not out to trick anyone. The questions we chose are designed to assess comprehension, not inferencing skills or analytic ability. If a student happens to pull three questions and really and truly “blanks,” we’ll happily let them try again. Sometimes kids get anxious; in those cases, we verbally quiz them away from the crowds, usually posing such open-ended prompts as, “Tell me about the book.” But even after you account for legitimate lapses in memory, test anxiety, allergies, color blindness, and cholera, you are going to have a few cherubs who just can’t answer the questions. What THEN?

Then they don’t go.

It takes willpower. It won’t always be easy. In this EGAT (Everybody Gets a Trophy) world, it’s hard to see a kid lose. You likely will have a sweet little girl who swears—with tears in her eyes—that she really did read the book, and turning her away may be the hardest thing you have to do. But be strong! We speak from experience when we say those sweet little girls have admitted to reading plot summaries on Wikipedia in an effort to pass the quiz.

You may have parents sending emails 18 minutes after dismissal the last day of quizzing, challenging your judgment and demanding a retake. It’s possible you’ll have colleagues who ask you to make an exception for a kid who would just be devastated if they didn’t get to go. STAY STRONG. You aren’t being mean; you are upholding high standards. There is a significant difference!

Here’s the deal. The majority of these kids will be back next year. And maybe even the year after that. And if we bend the rules for one kid who later brags that she didn’t really read the book, then we’ve lost credibility not just for this year, but for the foreseeable future.

We all know this, but it bears repeating: students learn more from failure than from success. The students who choose not to participate this time around may later come to regret it. They will remember that feeling and it may be just the push they need to take the chance next time.

The challenges Bilbo faced on his journey only served to make him more resolute, further developing his character. Don’t rob kids of the chance to grow. If you plan your quiz questions carefully and are confident in the legitimacy of the process, sit back, stick to your guns, quiz the kids, and watch the triumphant readers parade back to lunch.

Mary Cotillo, Erin O’Leary, and Kathleen McNeice all teach at Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, Massachusetts.



The Quest, Part 3: Goblin Caves and Spider Webs

The Quest, Part 2: Monday Morning Hobbit-Backing

Six Buses: The Quest for School-Wide Reading Begins!

This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in May 2011.

Tired of filling all your classroom wall space with charts, construction paper, and poster boards and then wondering how to recycle all that paper when it gets replaced with new charts and posters? Have you considered the reasons for inviting students to represent their thinking through visual texts? And have you tried using Glogs as an alternative?
  A New Reason
  Consider some of these ideas for creating a Glog:

• Collaborative groups can create Glogs about books they are reading during literature circles. They can pose questions that they might like to ask the author or a character.
• Students can create reviews of books they are reading. When seeking a new book to read, students can access each other’s reviews and get acquainted with their points of view.
• Groups of students can each study an author, including books written, style, genre, etc. and then create an author study Glog to share the information. They might identify their concerns or share their insights about issues being presented by the author. For example they might ask Sharon Draper if she experienced a personal loss that allowed her to so deeply describe the feelings of Andy in Tears of A Tiger.
• Students can create Idiom Glogs, Simile Glogs, Homophone Glogs, and others about tricky literary concepts. They can then offer tips on how to use these.

Learning About Glogs

To get started visit http://www.glogster.com/.

Glog Projects

Here are a couple of instructional examples that illustrate students sharing their voices and perspectives through a Glog.
  3rd grade Reading/Language Arts: Teacher, Kelly Johnson

Purpose: Create a Glog of a fairy tale character that conveys perspective differently than implied in the original text.

Task: After selecting a fairy tale, students worked in groups of three to think and talk about each character’s perspective of what was, or had occurred in the tale, and the perspective the author was creating. They were tasked with selecting one of the characters and retelling the fairy tale from a different perspective. For example, Cinderella could have left her slipper at the ball because she had not really liked the Prince or had not wanted to go to the ball. The wicked stepsisters could have been shown as sisters who were always bullied by Cinderella because she was prettier than they were. Students were asked to also discuss how the readers would perceive these character changes: Who would be the hero, the empowered, and the victim?

Ms. Johnson had assigned this task because she was attempting, within the context of critical literacy, to encourage her students to understand that in every story and situation they should analyze whose position is being supported by the author and whose voice is being ignored or silenced. After selecting their tales and characters, and creating the new perspective, students were then invited to share the selected character’s new perspective within the context of a Glog. Each group was asked to include photos and other visuals representing the new perspective. In addition, students were asked to include illustrations representing the setting. Students were able to scan in their own sketches of the scenes. Students could also include current or classical music that best illustrated the complexity of the problem being faced by the character. The solution to the dilemma was also to be included in the Glog in the form of a video the students created, a written paragraph, or an audio recording from the students themselves.
  11th grade Social Studies: Teacher, Javier Vaca

Purpose: Create a Glog persuading support for the “home front” efforts during WWI.
 
Task: Students worked as partners studying one of the following topics (Building Up the Military, Organizing Industry, Mobilizing the Workforce Ensuring Public Support; view an example here). Using a chapter from their social studies text, and related articles found via the Internet, their task was to first identify text-based visuals and information that had promoted “Home Front” support for WWI. Next, they interrogated the texts to determine who was being either supported or forgotten and what views were being either promoted or ignored. They then figured out ways to entwine their perspective as a way to communicatively engage with the author, and, finally, to use visuals to persuade others to their stance. Before beginning, students decided that they could persuade and inform by using visuals as well as words, and that they could then persuasively share their information within the context of a Glog.
  Benefits to Learning

These Glog projects supported the students in comprehending and then synthesizing the text-based information. Working as partners/teams, students were identifying, locating, and interrogating texts, and then discussing their thinking in order to negotiate the images and slogans that would persuade the audience viewing the Glog to view “home front” war support through the stance of the creators, or to have new insights and feelings about a fairytale character. In addition to reading information and reporting it in their own words, these students were also creating visual texts representing the newly learned information through images designed to persuade or to illustrate a new perspective.

Diane Lapp, EdD, is a distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University and an English teacher and literacy coach at Health Sciences High and Middle College.



TILE-SIG Feature: Create a Multimedia Poster Using Glogster

Engage: Plugged In