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Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Multiple Story "Put the Sentences in Order"

Once again, this is a post-reading activity which I learned from Annabelle Williamson (LaMaestraLoca) at IFLT this summer. It is actually an incredibly easy and quick activity to create (outside of cutting lots of sentence strips) and to facilitate. It will involve at least three different readings, with which your students are very familiar.

Pre-class directions
  1. Pick at least three different readings with which your students are familiar and you wish to review.
  2. Type up at least 15 sentences in the target language in a list for each reading in a large font. These sentences need to be in order of that particular reading. Do not number the sentences. You will also need to space each sentence.
  3. Cut each of the sentences into strips (one sentence per strip). 
  4. Type the titles of the readings and cut into strips.  
  5. Mix all of the strips together.
  6. You will need to repeat this as many times for groups of three, e.g., if you have 30 students, you will have 10 piles of identical strips.
Class directions
  1. Divide the class into groups of three.
  2. Give a pile of strips to each group.
  3. Tell the class that there are three stories' worth of sentences in the pile. Their task is to separate the sentences according to the reading and then to arrange those sentences in order of the story.
  4. When a group is finished, review its sentences to determine if it got the order correct. 
Observations
  1. This is a higher-order thinking activity, because it not only involves students knowing which sentence strip goes with which story but then to put those sentence strips in order - both of these when written in the target language.
  2. This is a quick 10-minute activity but a fun one to watch.
  3. Students are receiving repetitions of familiar understandable messages in this activity.
  4. I love seeing how the students work collaboratively on this activity. First, they separated the strips by story, and then each student took one of the stories to put into order. 
  5. I was surprised at how much students remembered from the earlier stories, even though it had been a month since we did the first story.
  6. If different stories have similar vocabulary, all the better, since this now requires to read each sentence strip closely to determine from which story the strip comes. I had two stories involving monsters, so students had to do close reading to determine of which story the sentence strip was a part.

2 comments:

  1. In this age of online learning, do you know of any websites where teachers could input sentences and students could rearrange them? I'm looking for a digital way to do this, aside from just numbering the sentences, which is less fun and I think less helpful than actually moving sentences around.

    By the way, your blog posts have been SUPER helpful to me in this season of teaching online. You have provided so many great ideas and communicated them in ways that are clear and simple. Thank you for the work you do and for sharing about it!
    - Linnea

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    Replies
    1. I would just make a big Google Slides presentation and manually shuffle the sentences. Then, assign it to students via Google Classroom, and then the groups share one set of slides among themselves. They can look at Slides as a grid so they can see many at once. Tell them to create "header" slides that give the title of the stories as well, once sorted. They can click and drag the individual slides to reorder.

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