This morning, I stared at the pile of Write, Draw, Pass papers that my students had completed with events from El Nuevo Houdini on Friday, trying to think of what I else I could do with them to review the story.
I ended up chopping up the completed papers and choosing nine sentence/illustration combos. The nine that I chose described different events from the story and contained grammatical errors that I wanted to target and discuss. I then scrambled up the pictures and sentences, so that no sentence was paired with the picture it described, and taped them onto a single sheet of paper. I scanned the final product into the computer and covered up the numbers on the sentence boxes (you could do this with white-out). It sounds like this was a very complicated process, but it took me less than 10 minutes.
In class, students worked with partners to complete the following tasks, in this order:
- Identify errors in the sentences.
- Cut apart all of the pieces (18 in all--9 sentences and 9 illustrations).
- Match up each sentence with its illustration
- Put the pairs in the order in which they occurred in the story.
We reviewed everything as a class, clarifying grammar conventions and discussing each event. Lots of reps, and it was great review for the story since the students hadn't read it in a few weeks.
