Taking Notes- Summarizing Information- 2nd Grade Style

2nd Graders have moved on from their Maps and Globes unit to learning about communities. Their investigation started out with looking at a map of our planet Earth at night.

We zoomed in to look at urban and rural areas and compared cities, like Jacksonville and Buenos Aires. the teacher then guided the students to come up with nouns that were found in rural and urban areas. These nouns were entered in a Wordle to create the Word Cloud below. The more one noun was mentioned by the students, the larger the word appears in the cloud.

The school subscribes to the Discovery Education Video Streaming service. We picked an age appropriate video clip about City, Suburb, and Rural Communities.

Each movie was divided into several segments. The objective of the lesson was to learn to extract information from a different media than a text book. In addition to learn about and work  with different media information, students also were working with different note taking methods.

Students were equipped with a paper, pencil and a clipboard, while watching the first segment, introducing the different communities and explaining general differences, . We started watching the video until a student yelled out “Atzor” (Stop in Hebrew), then summarized what they had heard and everybody wrote it on their notepaper. We had a notebook paper up on the big screen too to help with spelling. Students then called out “Lech” (Go in Hebrew) when everyone was done to continue to video. Notes were full sentences.

The second video clip was about life in the cities. Students, again, stopped the movie when they felt important information was being communicated. We then took a screenshot (with Skitch) and dragged it into a SmartBoard Notebook. The class made sure, by forwarding or rewinding the video,  to find just the right image / screenshot that was representative and was going to help them remember the information.

We watched and listened to the third video clip and extracted keywords to help us learn about suburbs.

The next step will be to continue watching the Rural segments of the video, taking notes and then compare and contrast all three communities in a Venn Diagram by moving the images or text in the appropriate areas according if they belong in one or more categories or not.

 Email This Post  Print This Post