Teach your students how to come up with keywords by playing a Topic game. Give a topic, pass a ball to each student, if you catch it, you have to say a word that is linked to the topic. e.g. Holiday is the topic - vocab might be: beach, sand, sun, car
After four lessons of passing the ball and coming up with keywords, the students had a clear understanding of what a title, keywords, sub-title, and bullet points. The last lesson was a bit harder, as I wanted to extend on the keywords, but our time was not enough.
What I noticed: establishing sub-titles is something the boys struggle with. My question is, do you give them subtitles so that they can learn a few variations or is there another activity I can do to develop their thinking around subtitles?
The first video shows how the students mainly focus on the looks. (their topic was "Dogs").
After reminding them to think further than just the looks, they managed to come up with keywords such as a kennel, meat, etc
The outcome of their planning, without support from me, is as follow.
I kept them moving: play the topic game, run to their books, wrote keywords down. We did this with each sub-title. This planning was done in 15minutes. After planning, the boys could retell in their own words what they wanted to say about each keyword.
SO WHAT?
* The planning was the students own, they knew what they wanted to say/write, and the topic was familiar. (Their choice)
* Although it was still very low-level ideas, I am hoping to teach them how to expand on their ideas next week in order to create a higher level writing sample.
* After showing them 2 different ways of planning, they were able to choose the one they preferred. It was interesting that they did not all choose the same one. So perhaps, giving students the option to choose the way they want to plan, might help to support their understanding.
I think it's important to keep these boys interested and focussed. Keep them moving. Short, quick instructions.
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