Discussion
Often students are not very good at asking questions. Teachers need to model a variety of questions and help students unpack questions so as to understand their components. With a better understanding of how to write questions, students may also improve their ability to answer questions.
9. Role play, song, chant and rap (Kagan & Kagan, 1998)
Adding movement, music and rhythm helps to enliven classrooms and appeals especially to students who prefer learning through motion, songs, chants, raps and other less standard classroom activities.
Steps
a) After the teacher has finished reading, groups meet to brainstorm ways of using movement (such as role play), music (such as songs) and/or rhythm (such as raps or chants) to portray all or part of what they heard.
b) Groups synthesise their ideas to design a performance that they will do for others, making sure that each group member has an important role in it. They rehearse their performance.
c) Groups do their performance for another group and receive feedback based on criteria developed by the class.
Discussion
This activity fits with the concept of individual differences discussed in Section 3. If we always rely on the written word in class, those students who prefer learning in this way are likely to always be the stars of their groups and always be the ones helping their groupmates. By varying the communication mode, teachers attempt to facilitate a shift in the power balance in groups. Perhaps, other students, e.g., those good at acting or composing raps, will have an opportunity to be the helpers, and the students who were always the helpers will have an opportunity to be the ones receiving help.
10. Scribing Activities
In this activity, groups work together to collect and piece together information in order to retell the story that the teacher has read aloud.
Steps
1) Students are in groups of two, three or four. After the teacher finishes reading aloud, one group member is chosen at random to be the scribe, and others are reporters.
2) The teacher has written each of the key events of the story in sentence form on the unused side of a used piece of paper (in order to save trees) and posted each event on the wall in different parts of the room. (Examples are provided below of key events for two stories.)
3) The reporters move around the classroom finding these pieces of paper and writing down the events. The reporters memorise the information and return to the stationary scribe.
4) The scribe writes down everything they are told.
5) When all of the information has been located, the group puts the sentences in correct order according to when the events occurred in the story.
6) Groups can do an additional task, e.g., elaborating on the sentences, writing a moral to a story or drawing pictures to illustrate a process described in the book.
Two stories with which we have used scribing are Swimmy (Lionni, 1973), a story that demonstrates the benefits of collaboration, and The Three Little Pigs. Here is one way to divide these two stories into key event sentences.
Swimmy
1) There was a school of fish.
2) All of the fish were red except Swimmy who was small and black.
3) Swimmy escaped when a big fish ate all of his friends.
4) Swimmy was alone but he saw many wonderful things in the ocean.
5) Swimmy found a new school of fish and he taught them to move like a big fish.
6) Swimmy was the eye.
7) Together they scared away the big fish.
طرزشناختن زمان گذشته کامل (ماضی بعید)