Big Post Its Are My Favorite Teaching Tool!

Once again I'm going to share a strategy I used with Big Post It notes. They're just so quick and easy. And the students seem to like using them. This year my district is really focusing on literacy strategies in all content. This is great for me because that's one of the things I love to do. My favorite class in grad school was Reading and Writing across the Curriculum. (Just a quick note: If you have never used the following two books, I strongly recommend getting them and looking through them. They have amazing strategies for incorporating reading into your classroom.
1.)  Daniels, H. , and S. Zemelman. Subjects matter, every teacher's guide to content-area reading. Heinemann Educational Books, 2004. print.

 2.) Tovani, C. . Do I really have to teach reading?, content comprehension, grades 6-12. Stenhouse Pub, 2004. print.

 But getting back to the Big Post Its and the pre-reading activity I did with my biology students...I first learned this strategy in my Grad school class and have done it several times but then I was inspired to try it again after going over it in my Science Curriculum meeting. The way the strategy works is that you pick out key words from a reading (the reading could be a textbook, or article, whatever you choose), in this case I used an article. I picked out about 8 words that I thought were big ideas from the article and then I gave the students the words. In groups of 3 or 4 they had to write the words spread out on a big post it. Then I had them round robin to draw lines connecting words and writing what the connection was between the words. Then at the bottom of the page they made a prediction about what the article would be about. The next step is that they read the article and then re-write their prediction to summarize the article. The following is the citation for the article I used:

I used this activity and article during my ecology unit as a way to talk about food webs and how everything is connected as well as discussing invasive species and how organisms affect each other. The following are some pictures of the Big Post It Activity

This activity worked really well and the students actually wanted to read the article and were interested! Also it was a good way to start thinking about what I want to do next...Mind Mapping! My next unit is cells and I think I am going to try to incorporate mind maps several times. This is something I've wanted to do but I've always struggled to make it work. The activity I did was a good way to have the students do a simple word connection activity which is the basis of a mind map. So maybe teaching mind mapping in small steps will help! Hopefully I'll have some cool pictures to post for my next entry!