Helping students to determine the main idea of a story can be a challenge. I have tried several approaches over the years, including one of my most successful – the Bull’s Eye strategy. The general method is to discuss the value of the various circles of a Bull’s Eye. The smallest center is only large enough to capture one idea, while the outer rings can hold several less important ideas. In-person, I give students sticky notes to write sentences or phrases from the text and then discuss where to place them on a Bull’s Eye drawn on the whiteboard. More details can be found here.
Recently I had the opportunity to share this idea with Felicia Fischer, an outstanding special education teacher in Round Lake Area Schools. Felicia adapted the idea for her virtual instruction, using JamBoard and YouTube. She had students watch a short video on volcanos and then modeled how to move the ideas around on JamBoard, placing the main idea in the middle.
Recently I had the opportunity to share this idea with Felicia Fischer, an outstanding special education teacher in Round Lake Area Schools. Felicia adapted the idea for her virtual instruction, using JamBoard and YouTube. She had students watch a short video on volcanos and then modeled how to move the ideas around on JamBoard, placing the main idea in the middle.
Next, students watched a Social Studies video and practiced on their own slide with three ideas that Felicia had created in advance for them.
After several practices in this manner, with lots of class discussion, Felicia began to teach students how to generalize this strategy to text, especially when they may not have access to sticky notes or a JamBoard. Generalization instruction is always a solid sign of specially designed instruction!
Thanks, Felicia, for creatively adapting to meet your students' needs in a virtual environment!
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