The Moment Balanced Literacy Teachers Live for...

Today I was leading my students through a summarizing activity on the website Into the Book. They were learning how to become pirates by reading sections of a pirate manual. After reading each section, they had to highlight the sentences that described the main idea and supporting details and drag them onto a ship sail. Then they had to use the main ideas from each section to write a summary of the manual.

One of my students raised his hand and said, "this is just like making boxes and bullets in our jottings!"

Other students shouted out their thoughts such as: Hey, yea! and Wow, you're right!  and my favorite, This is just like that! We are making jottings without even meaning to!