Using Synonyms to Understand a Text

I don't know under what skill we might file this (speaking? circumlocution? summarizing? understanding a reading? all or none of the above?), but this was something I did with my students today and thought I'd share.

My threes are reading the beginning of Genesis, and it's fairly legible, but there are some phrases that throw them off. They're also having some difficulty summarizing in their own words because it's written succinctly, and because let's face it, talking can be a difficult skill to acquire. What we did today worked well for us, and I think it's something I will try again.

I'm posting it here because I've found that it's of enormous benefit to me when I spend time finding ways to say the same thing variously. When we do it with a class, you also get the benefit of your students hearing things from each other that they hadn't come up with themselves. It's not heavy production, but it does ask them to pull and then pool their language skills to consider other methods of expressing themselves and expressing certain ideas.

We sat down with what we'd read together so far, and for each phrase (and sometimes for individual words), we annotated the entire reading with other ways we could say what was written there. 

We came up with six ways to say he made, some words for God and 'in the beginning,' other ways of describing the concept of the Earth/land/sky, and so forth. 

Then I offered a sweet treat to anyone who could give a summary of the passage. This is in all ways bribery, but I feel like they earn something at the end of stepping out on a limb. About nine of them did, and some of them used mostly the text's words, others their own. My end observations on this are that students who were otherwise unwilling to summarize suddenly were willing to because they'd put some intense focus into how to think about the passage; they pulled language out of their brains in a creative but directed way; they were not required to produce anything they were uncomfortable with, but they got very focused input on specific items; they did get to have significant input in what we wrote down; those who gave input (which was almost all of them) got validation because EVERYONE wrote down what they said and used it to annotate their passage.

It took about twenty minutes to annotate about seven lines of Latin; it could take more or less depending on how far you want to push it. We came up with some pretty wacky ways of saying things (including that face can be described as 'the part that can be seen').