The Main Idea Tweet! - This Year's Most Brilliantly Simple and Simply Powerful Instructional Strategy!

The Main Idea Tweet - An Instant Reflection and Tool for Summarizing Any Story, Lesson, or Activity!

Summarizing is hard for kids. There's a lot of cognitive processes that go into it. Apart from being able to read and understand what they read, kids have to identify the author's purpose, identify the most important information and differentiate it from the unimportant information, understand key vocabulary, and write/explain it logically and concisely. 

So here's an idea that I developed from some really effective summarizing and reading strategies. The strategy certainly is not my brainchild, but here's the documents I use to implement it. 

Attached here are is the worksheet I use to make tweets for the kids, and a simple and quick lesson on how you could implement this in your classroom. 

Make a bulletin board with a space for each kid. They can literally "post" their tweet on the board and use it as a reflection piece. Keep a folder or a pocket of blank tweet pages for kids to use anytime you're finished with a lesson or activity.

Since a lesson reflection is a hard thing to remember to do (or have time to do) having this set up ahead of time makes it something you can do in 1-2 minutes or you can do on your way out to recess or while transitioning to the next lesson. 

Bonus: visiting teachers and administrators will see your lesson reflections on the board! #bestteacherever

Twitter Board from The Classroom Creative

Give it a try, make your own changes, share your OWN reflections, thoughts, ideas, and feedback in the comments below!