Smashdoodles

This is a great post-reading activity, and I feel like I have come totally late to the party on this one. A Smashdoodle is a way for students to interact with a reading, to demonstrate comprehension, and to summarize these interactions in various ways. It is called a Smashdoodle, because essentially, one is "smashing together" various components of a reading in one place to demonstrate comprehension, reflection, and/or higher order thinking. A Smashdoodle can be done digitally on a slide or on paper. Students can create a poster summarizing different parts of the text, fill out a foldable graphic organizer, or fill out boxes on a sheet of paper.

You can ask WHATEVER questions you want on a Smashdoodle, but the purpose is that the artifact is a holistic summary of the text. Possible questions to address - students can answer this as written sentences or as images (digital or drawn):

• Copy five sentences which best summarize the text.
• Who are the characters in this reading?
• Where is the location of the reading?
• Draw a picture which summarizes the reading
• Write down any words from the reading which are new to you
• Write down (parts of speech) from the reading.
• Reflection questions
• I learned that…
• I was surprised/shocked to learn that…
• I found it interesting that

Below is my first attempt at a Smashdoodle - it is very basic and on paper:

As I said, there are SO many different ways to do a Smashdoodle, and I feel that others explain it so much better than I do (and they have student examples to show). Below are some blog posts from where I learned how to do a Smashdoodle:

• Scott Benedict Smashdoodle write up
• Martina Bex Smashdoodle write up
• John Piazza Smashdoodle write up
• Elizabeth Detlinger Smashdoodle write up

For those of you who have done Smashdoodles, what do you like about them?