How do games tell stories?
Stating Big Ideas
MINDS ON
Short Form
Young people sometimes get criticized for the short-forms they use in their writing, but would you believe that being able to shorten information down to just the essential ideas is actually an important skill? How good do you think you are at identifying the most important ideas from a text and then stating them in the fewest words possible?
Remember the story of the Three Little Pigs? It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs who left their parents' house to seek their fortunes.
The first pig was kind of lazy so he built his house out of straw. The second pig was willing to work a little harder so he built his house out of sticks. The third pig was a really hard worker and he took the time and effort to build a really sturdy house out of bricks.
One day, a hungry wolf came along and saw the house of straw and smelled the pig inside and decided it was time for a snack so he yelled, "Little pig, little pig, let me come in!"
The pig replied, "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin."
"Then I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in," the wolf replied. And that's exactly what the wolf did.
The first little pig had just enough time to escape to his brother's house next door.
The wolf, excited at the prospect of now getting to eat two pigs instead of just one, approached the house of sticks and yelled, "Little pig, little pig, let me come in!"
To which the second pig replied, "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin."
"Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in," the wolf said. It took a little more huffing and puffing than the house of straw but sure enough, it blew over.
The two little pigs had just enough time to escape to their brother's brick house next door.
The wolf, undaunted, walked to the brick house next door, and yelled, "Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in!"
The pigs yelled back, "Not by the hair of our chinny chin chins!"
"Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in!" the wolf replied. He huffed and he puffed as hard as he could but he could not blow down the house.
After having so much success with the previous houses, this was pretty disappointing for the wolf so he howled at the pigs, promising them that he would come down their chimney to eat them. This was probably the wolf's biggest mistake because it gave the pigs enough time to stoke the fire and put on a pot of boiling water. When the wolf came down the chimney as promised, he fell straight into the pot of water where the pigs cooked him and ate him for their supper!
This version of The Three Little Pigs is 414 words long. Do you think you could retell it in 100 words? How about 50 words? 10 words?
100-50-5 Word Summary
Use the following organizer to record your summaries of The Three Little Pigs.
Then write a summary on how you decided what information to keep and what information to cut.
ACTION
Reading Strategies
You probably already have a lot of strategies that you use to help you make sense of things that you read, even if you're not aware of those reading strategies. Just like the listening strategies you learned about in the first unit, we can break up reading strategies into things that you do before, during, and after reading.
| Before reading, strong readers: | During reading, strong readers: | After reading, strong readers: |
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Set a purpose for their reading (are you reading for information? for fun? for a specific detail?); Preview the text (read the title and any headings, read captions, look at pictures); Make predictions (what do you think this text will be about?). |
Read things in order, sometimes skimming sections while focusing on others depending on the purpose; Reread sections when something doesn't make sense or seems important; Identify the main idea and supporting details; Check and change predictions; Monitor comprehension and use fix-up strategies; Visualize what they're reading; Make connections to other texts, their own lives, and the world; Make inferences (this means reading between the lines of the text or making educated guesses about the text); Paraphrase (put it in your own words) and summarize (shorten the information to include only the most important parts) passages; Respond to and evaluate (form judgements about something) the text. |
Reread sections if they need to; Summarize what they read; Think about how they could use this information. |
In this activity, we're going to focus on the following reading strategies:
Before Reading...
- Preview the text. This means reading the title and any headings, reading captions and looking at pictures. You might also read the title, look at the cover, read the back of the book and maybe skim the chapter titles in order to get an idea of what the book might be about.
- Make predictions. This means considering what the book might be about. Based on the image on the cover you might predict that the book is a science fiction book and that it might be set in the future or might include technology that we don't currently have.
During Reading...
- Visualize what we're reading. As you read about the main character's walk to school you might picture it like a movie being filmed from the main character's point of view. You try to imagine the scenery passing by as though you're watching a movie.
- Make connections to other texts, your own life and the world. Maybe the book is set in a futuristic world that you've never experienced, but the main character might be dealing with challenges that you have faced before. You can connect to that character through your shared experiences.
After Reading...
- Summarize what you read. Pick out the main ideas of the reading and some supporting details.
Before Reading: Previewing the Text
You will be reading a chapter from one of the following novels. It's up to you to choose the novel you're most interested in. You can read the reviews for each of these books in order to learn more about them.
Based on these reviews, think about which book seems the most interesting to you.
Keep in mind that while movies have been made for two of these books, the movie version of the book is always different.
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After deciding which book you'd like to read a chapter from, make some predictions about what you think will happen in your chapter. If you have seen the movie version of one of the books but you'd still like to read the chapter, you can use what you remember about the movie to make your predictions.
During Reading
As you read, you are going to choose one of the following reading strategies to use. When you click on a strategy, you will be linked to a graphic organizer you can use while reading.
When you have selected your book, you can download and open the chapter from The Hunger Games, The Leveller or Ready Player One.
Reading Strategy
Complete your graphic organizer for the reading strategy you chose.
After Reading: Writing a Summary
You are now going to write a summary of what you read for someone your age who has not read the same selection as you. Your goal is to communicate the main idea and supporting details of the selection in one complete paragraph. Your first step is to identify the main idea and supporting details, just like you did when you wrote your summary of "The Three Little Pigs".
Figuring out the Main Idea and Supporting Details
Since this is a chapter from a longer book, you probably won't find the main idea in the first paragraph of the chapter. That first paragraph was more likely written to establish the mood or setting for the chapter. Instead, you will have to think back to what your impression of the main idea was after having read the entire chapter.
- Was the chapter from the beginning of the book or part way through the middle? If it was from the beginning, then you can infer that the author is trying to give you background information about character, setting, plot, and possibly the primary conflict in the story. If it was from the middle, then you can infer that the author wouldn't be spending as much time establishing background information, and is probably focused on developing an important part of the plot and conflict.
- Guess and check. Try out a statement that you think might reflect the main idea. For example, if you think the main idea is that the wolf was treated unfairly by the three little pigs, skim the chapter you read and check and see if most of the other details in the chapter seem to connect to that idea. If not, revise your main idea.
- Once you have a main idea that seems to work, choose three of the details you checked and include them as your supporting details. Make sure they clearly connect to the main idea. For example, if your main idea was, "The third pig did not have his house blown down because he took the time to build a strong house," and the chapter happens to include a description of the setting, don't choose that as your supporting detail.
Main Ideas and Supporting Details
Use the following graphic organizer to record your ideas about the main idea and supporting details.
Use the following checklist to ensure that you've met the expectations for this task:
| Checklist Items | |
|---|---|
| I have identified the main idea. | |
| I have re-read the chapter to check that the main idea is supported by most of the ideas in the chapter. | |
| I have included three supporting details that are directly connected to the main idea. | |
| I have included a quotation for each of the supporting details. |
Writing the Summary
Using the main idea and supporting details you identified from the graphic organizer, you will write a summary of the chapter. Consider this summary of the graphic novel selection from the previous activity:
SummaryExample
Notice that in the exemplar above, the paragraph contains the following:
- a topic sentence that identifies the chapter, title of the book (in italics) and main idea;
- supporting details written in complete sentences;
- transition words/phrases to connect ideas;
- a logical order of ideas;
- explanation of supporting details where necessary for it to make sense to a reader who doesn't know the text;
- a quotation from the text to illustrate one of the supporting details;
- a concluding sentence that restates the main idea;
- correct spelling and punctuation.
Your summary should include these details too.
Summary of a Chapter
Using the exemplar above as your model, write a summary of the chapter you read for the purpose of explaining the main idea and supporting details of the chapter for an audience of your classmates who are interested but haven't read the chapter.
Use the checklist below to self-assess your summary.
| Checklist Items | |
|---|---|
| I have written a topic sentence that identifies the chapter, title of the book (in italics) and the main idea; | |
| I have included supporting details written in complete sentences; | |
| I have used transition words/phrases to connect ideas; | |
| I have organized my supporting details in a logical order; | |
| I have kept my audience and purpose in mind and explained any ideas that need additional explanation; | |
| I have used at least one quotation from the text to illustrate one of my supporting details; | |
| I have written a concluding sentence that restates the main idea; | |
| I reread my paragraph and checked for correct spelling and punctuation. |
CONSOLIDATION
Thinking About Reading
Consider the following questions:
- Think about the reading strategies you used in this activity. Which ones were the most useful for you? What's a strategy you didn't use this time that you could try next time?
- Think back to the graphic novel excerpt you read in the previous activity. How is reading a chapter from a novel different from reading a chapter from a graphic novel? Can you use any of the same reading strategies?
Learning Goals and Success Criteria
Learning Skills and Work Habits