Note-Taking (Grades 4 – 6)
Materials/Media: None. We use our imagination
Aim/Objectives: to get fourth graders to take concise, pertinent notes
Audience/Grade Level: Grade 4 – 6
Activities: Extracting relevant information
Additional Resources: You need a cooperating teacher who will role-play. Have teacher at one end of room and Library Media Specialist at the other. Use your teacher voices!
Attention Getter:
Tell the students that you are a teen-ager who has to take a phone message for your parents from a friend of their’s who’s at the mall, calling from a pay phone. The teacher plays the calling-friend.
Script:
Calling-friend (teacher) using imaginary phone, keys in number. Phone rings. (Imaginary again. Use your voice for this.) Teenager (LMS) picks up phone.
You take it from there. Calling-friend needs to have a complicated message (the wordier the better, and talking fast) for the teenager who tries to remember it without writing it down – then panics as soon as the phone is hung up. Can’t remember a thing. Wishes the friend would call back, and fortunately she does because she remembers something she forgot to say. Grateful teenager says how lucky it is that the person called back because she has already forgotten the message and needs to write it down. Gets pencil and paper. She then proceeds to try to write down every single word the person says. Ask her to please slow down.
Friend says: “You’re not writing down every single word I’m saying, are you? Just take down the important ones. I’m on a pay phone.”
Teenager does that, writing down keywords. Ours were: friend’s name; place, time and location to meet her, and the added item: what to bring.
I then wrote on the board what I had written down on the paper. Class reconstructed the message for me, and I wrote that on the board. Then I told them I had just taken notes, and we discussed why it made sense to write down keys words and to make sure they were the pertinent words. It all took less than 15 minutes.
Outcomes:
1. The kids were mesmerized! We really got their attention.
2. They were able to understand the connection and apply it to the lesson. It was an example from their real world.
3. The teacher had a ball and immediately got involved in the lesson that ensued.
Comments:
My experience is that kids this age write down every single word when they take notes. Even changing the final product doesn”t affect this. They will still write every little word.
It worked so well! It’s a “get their attention and focus them on what you want to accomplish gimmick”. Of course this is B6 #4.2: Extracting relevant information! (See also Trash & Treasure)
