More and More I'm adding in Common Core Standards for English in the class (which is not completely easy seeing that I have 5, 190 years to cover in one semester in the first place). But I'm currently taking a literacy workshop that discusses techniques to help students and items that need to be worked on to develop their reading and comprehension capabilities further. At the last meeting, the discussion was on summarization skills and that students can't always put stories into their own words, etc. At the same time in my lessons we are covering the Middle Ages with Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales. I borrowed a short abridged version of the Canterbury Tales from a fellow teacher (used in the E.C. English class).
Round One of my classroom heard the abridged version of the "Knight's Tale" about the two knights who fall in love with the same lady (I'll not tell you more, in case you want to read it or reread it). Round Two of my classroom heard the abridged version of the "Nun's Priest tale" about the rooster and the fox. Students then went into Toontastic for the Knights Tale or most used Puppet Pals for the Nun's Priest Tale. They recreated what they remembered from the story. They were allowed to jot down notes while hearing the story, but were not physically given a copy of the story to make sure they couldn't copy it. I had a couple good versions, but I also had some that weren't so great (there seems to be a correlation between the Lexile Scores of the group members and what they recalled). But it allowed students to make a fun and creative viewing while also covering basic skills for English and content for World History. Most did not miss the Canterbury Tales question on their test because they remembered that it was what their tales were from.
In the future: a) I think I'm going to have a recording of the story so that they can re-listen to it if they'd like to, but still not have a printed version so they can't directly take from the story, b) I'm going to have more time for them to work on it, it was the first time we were using Toontastic and Puppet Pals, c) I need to make sheets for the Apps for step by step how to do it. Some did the whole story in the first scene box of Toontastic, but Toontastic breaks a story down into components, just like an English class would with items like problem, climax, and resolution. So while I'm going to keep the activity I'm going to be doing some tweaking to make it better.
