DIY Heading Match

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that Can Be Used with Any Reading Text)

Sample: docs, pub

This is an idea I got recently from an idea bank at my school.  I tried it out in one of my classes and it worked well.  In my class, I used it with Unit 7 Reading 1 from Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 5 (Second Edition), and the sample worksheet that I made reflects that, but it can also be adapted to any number of readings.

This works best with a reading text that has numerous paragraphs, and preferably those paragraphs are numbered.  I assigned one paragraph to each student.  

According to the direction from my school, each paragraph is meant to be assigned to a pair or a group, but in the case of this particular reading, there were enough paragraphs for everyone in my class to get one one by themselves.

Because I had access to an the reading text on an electronic format, I ended up just printing it on a separate sheet of paper and cutting it up so that each student was given a slip of paper with their paragraph on it.  But if you can't do this, you can just as easily assign them the paragraph number.

The students then write a short heading for their paragraph.  That heading should be between one and 5 words in length.  (No more than 5 words.)  The heading should encapsulate the main idea of that paragraph. 

When the students are done, they give their paragraph heading to me.  I think stick it up around the room somewhere. 

When all the headings are complete, the students then walk around the room with their textbooks, reading the headings and matching the headings to the appropriate paragraph.  (I made a worksheet for them to do this on.  It does involve them re-writing the heading on their worksheet, but hopefully this shouldn't be too much of a burden since all the headings will be 5 words or less.)

When everyone is finished, they return to their seats.

I conducted feedback by walking around the room and collecting the paragraph headings.  I then read them out aloud, and the student who had written that heading told the class what paragraph it matched with.  

According to my school, this activity is meant to focus on identifying detailed ideas in paragraphs.  

I experimented with this activity in my class and found it worked very well.  I'm not sure how the students would react to it if I did it every day, but as a one-time activity, they found it a fun change of pace.  There was a minor hiccup in the feedback when one student forgot which paragraph heading he had written, but other than that, it worked pretty smoothly.

In my class, I also did this activity as the second reading activity in the class.  The students had already read the text one time for general understanding before we did this activity, which I think helped to make it go smoother.

Write a short heading or subtitle for your section. It should be no more than five words in length. It should summarize the general idea of the section. It must not indicate the paragraph number.

Walk around the room.  Look at the summaries.  Write the summaries next to the paragraph number

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