Highlight Away
3Here’s a way to assess what students understand in a reading without them translating or you writing questions… HIGHLIGHTING! I also have a study skills class with ESL students. I love seeing, and stealing, different activities from the other teachers. This highlighting activity is from Ms. Rice’s 10th grade English class. The goal is to “create a mental model of story elements.” With a little tweaking, it is now an interpretive reading for mine that also supports another content area.
First show the following slide and review with them some examples (“Who” can be… A person, animal, or thing.) You may want to do one together or at least show a model. If you are focusing on something specific (adjectives, family vocab, etc,), add that too. Now that I have this slide, I can quickly adapt the activity for any reading.
Give them highlighters that correspond to the colors on the slide. If you don’t have enough for your entire class, set this up as a station activity or have them underline with colored markers.
Give them some readings. I love to screenshot peopleenespanol.com or copy from the magazine. Give them some choices or let them pick their own.
Here’s the slide in English:
The last part that I’m still trying to figure out is giving them some feedback. Should I show them mine with the answers? Should they do something else with it after that? Help me out here!
This activity is sold on http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Creative-Language-Class in French and Spanish. An English version is coming soon.
Megan
rachel573
Kara
I think you could just discuss the colors and groups of words in each color , like “las palabras en amarillo son…and list them out” – another way to reinforce colors…
Another idea would be to hand each student a color card associated w the highlighter colors and have them group together after the highlighting part and as you read the article, that groups raises their hand or jumps up (if you want to really get them moving) when you say a word that is highlighted w their color.
This is a great idea to divide the Who, where, when, accion – students won’t feel so overwhelmed looking at a big article thinking, “There is too much on here that I don’t understand so I’m not doing it at all!”
Could students. share the highlighting with a partner and compare, then together try to deduce a simple main idea about what the paragraph is about. Share/compare with another group and report out?
By the way, have you seen GoodReader on the iPad? It’s an app we have at our school but I have yet to use it!
Sure! Group work is great. Each student could be responsible for a different color. I’ve seen goodreads. How are thinking to use it in class?