This week we have been all about the presidents, so that means LOTS of non fiction text! With some of my intermediate kids, that also means working on comprehension strategies. I also have to incorporate a lot of writing and syntax skills in pretty much everything I do because of my students' needs. So I came up with this!
I took a bunch of sentence strips like this and a passage about George Washington. I used text from Reading A-Z, which my school has a subscription to…such an awesome resource! I can download materials for just about anything on many different reading levels, which sure does make life easier for me!
First, I modeled for them what I wanted them to do…I wrote the main idea of the paragraph on one color strip, then one detail on the next strip. Then I had them each take a paragraph and do the same thing independently.
Then, I told them to cut each word. But WHY, Ms. Alcorn???
So you can mix them up! And then pass them to the person on your left (then I watched for L's appear on their fingers trying to figure out which is their left…oy…another day). Oh, and then pass them again. 
Alright, friends, unscramble your sentences! Woot! Not only are the working on the word order, but they are learning the facts that their friends wrote about George! Once they figured out the sentences, they read them aloud and we chatted about them.
We had a great time with this activity, so I hope you guys can find a use for it in your speech world too! What do you think?
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This is great. I do something similar, based off of the classroom based learning program called PWIM or picture word induction model. You might be interested in reading up on it. Your activity will definetly add to what I do already with PWIM. Thanks for sharing.
I love this, and it’s actually really similar to something I did with one of my client’s this week! We talked about George Washington too, and did a similar activity but with a little more of the EET format (since it’s what we’ve been teaching him to use for both vocabulary growth and reading comprehension). Cool! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
What an awesome, easy idea! I am going to try this with my older kiddos next week and see how they like it! Thanks! 🙂
Jenn,
What a great idea. I am always impressed by your creativity!
Check out reaadworks.org if you haven’t already. It is a free site allowing you to access multiple grade level reading selections and common core goal areas. Biggest plus; it’s free!
Thanks Annie!! I appreciate your tip, I will check it out 🙂