Purpose of the strategy:
Often we read texts (articles, reports, novels poems, etc.) that contain many different ideas and pieces of information in them. There are also often different layers of ideas in what we read. This strategy will help you first, get as many ideas out of a text as you can and second, make some decisions about which are ideas are most important to the author and interesting to you.
When to use this strategy:
After you have read a text and are trying to figure out which ideas are most important or interesting.
Directions:
Complete the following statement about [whatever students read] in at least ten different ways:
__________ is a [story, poem, essay, paragraph, section] about ___________
Model:
Macbeth is a play about:
- ambition
- a dysfuntional marriage
- witchcraft
- how a guilty conscience can drive you insane
- betraying friends
- how power corrupts
- how you can't escape your fate
- how one bad act leads to another and another...
- what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman during the time of this play
- riddles and their twisted meanings, etc.
Scaffolded Practice:
Students make individual lists. These lists are shared (in pairs, groups or whole class) with students adding other ideas to their lists as they hear them.
Applications:
Depending on the teacher's purpose:
- Students can choose an idea they would like to write about or explore further
- Teachers can guide a discussion about which ideas are central and which are supporting (useful with a nonfiction text)
- Teachers can ask students to work in groups from the master list of ideas and create an outline of the text or a graphic organizer (tree, etc.)
Notes to the Teacher:
This process reinforces the idea that different readers get different meanings out of texts, while also requiring students to come to some consensus, with the support of the teacher, on the key or crucial ideas needed to comprehend the author's intention in the text.
