This week we worked on identifying important details in a text to write a summary of the first quadrant. We focused on the first quadrant of our reading and discussed how a sequence of events occurs from one small event in the text. To scaffold for my students, we spent one day identifying 6 important events from both character perspectives in the book. Once students identified these 12 events - they decided which one they believes to be the most important for each character's plotline. Students learned how to properly cite evidence from a text and how to analyze how the event is significant to the plotline. Once students had completed all of these tasks, we had focused instruction on developing a topic introduction with context and a thesis and then put it altogether into a well-developed TIDE paragraph.
The slideshow belows shows the scaffolding students were provided with this week so that they could write a successful retell summary of the first quadrant of the text.
When teaching the topic introduction, I provided students with a sentence frame: "Finding Mighty" by Sheela Chari tells the story of _____________. Then, I challenged students to complete the sentence, explaining what the book is about, in ten words or less. They freaked out! I modeled with an example and then we used a collaborative document to create individual statements. Students challenged themselves to find new words and to organize their thoughts differently from their peers. (Student feedback was excellent on this collaborative task!) After reviewing this activity as a class, I modeled for students how to copy & paste their ten words or less summary into the graphic organizer. When they noticed that they just wrote a topic introduction their minds were blown! You will notice in the image below that we still need some work in developing contextual understanding when using synonyms for word choice in our writing, but this was a great first attempt!
For the writing, students used a graphic organizer with embedded sentence frames to organize their thoughts prior to writing. The scaffolded activities throughout the week allowed students to easily insert text evidence and detailed examination of the significance to the plot to their graphic organizer. Students then made a prediction, and typed a final response in a google doc. Students were extremely worried this writing task was going to be time-consuming and difficult; however, when they realized the scaffolded instruction throughout the week led up to this final writing task, students felt confident that they could write a well-developed retell summary of the first quadrant of "Finding Mighty" with supporting text evidence.
Reflection: Students were successful with this task considering it was so scaffolded. I will need to go over how to move notes from an organizer to a paragraph format. Some students were able to do this successfully after I modeled the process, but a lot of students were not successful with the change in formatting from a graphic organizer to a fully-developed, written paragraph. Other than that, students showed evidence of critical thinking, inferencing, and connections to the text. Students were successful at citing important events and providing detailed examination on why that event was significant to the plot. Next week, we will continue to build background knowledge on urban art and look deeper at character thoughts, actions, and feelings to determine character traits. We will also continue our work on using synonyms and understanding how some words may mean the same, yet have significantly different contextual meaning.