Teaching Note-Taking Skills

For the past couple of years I have been working on ways to improve our students' note-taking skills and increasing the number strategies they use while reading during research.  Last week I used an activity from the website ReadWriteThink called "Fact Fragment Frenzy".  Check it out! http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/factfrenzy/opening.html

The students (4th and 5th grades) did a really nice job working in pairs using laptops and dragging the "fact fragments" over to the notepad.  Several students also told me "That was fun!".  Hey, anytime I hear that a library media skill activity is fun, I'm happy!

This week I followed up the "Fact Fragment Frenzy" activity with a summarizing activity.  I used an idea from the Reading Quest Strategies website, http://www.readingquest.org/strat/summarize.html called "Sum It Up".  Using laptops, I had the 4th grade students read an article about a planet from World Book Online (they are studying the solar system in science) and complete the worksheet from "Sum It Up".  I asked them to read the article first and then write down Fact Fragments under the section labeled "Main Idea Words".  I circulated among the students and gave them tips (if needed) on how to write down only the "fragments" not complete sentences.   Some of them got it right away!  Others needed a few strategies or suggestions (like using 2nd instead of writing out "second", not repeating the name of the planet over and over, etc.).  Only a few students had time to get to the 2nd half of the activity sheet where they narrowed down the main idea words to only 20.  We only had about 20-25 minutes to complete the whole lesson, so I thought they did a good job for the most part.

Today's 4th grade class was the first I had to do the "Sum It Up" activity, but I will do it with the remaining 4th grade classes and all the 5th grade classes.

I will probably do another note-taking activity in several weeks coordinating with the teachers when the students will be doing research for a class project.