Read and Draw

This is a summarization technique that I use with some regularity to great effect.

I am fortunate to own ten giant white boards (which can be gotten at CostCo or on Amazon), but this could just as easily be done with butcher paper, on the surface of a desk with whiteboard markers, or on 8.5x11 printer paper. This is a two-day activity.

Day one: I set up the desks in pairs facing each other. Each student was armed with a copy of a familiar passage, and each PAIR had a giant whiteboard and marker. This began almost as a popcorn reading. The first partner read a line to the second partner, who drew a picture and did NOT erase it. The second partner then read the second line and the other one drew it. The goal was, at the end, to have the entire passage illustrated.



Day two: desks are in pairs again. One student from each pair takes their board, and I play music. The student with the board (A) wanders around until the music stops, at which point they sit with the nearest no-board person (B), hands over their board and pulls out their text. Person A reads the text slowly to person B, who points at the various parts of the illustration that represent the text. Then, person B summarizes the text back to person A in their own words. Having done this, person B earns person A's board and now will be the one who wanders and reads the text. This switches off intermittently. That means ideally that each person is alternating reading and listening to/summarizing the text throughout the entire class period, getting a HUGE amount of the same repeated input.

At the end, we take ten minutes to do a timed write about the text. The most recent time we did this, from the first time we wrote about the text a week before to the timed write after this activity, there was an average increase of forty words per student.