Moving Summarizations

I am currently providing workshops for Greenville County in Activating and Summarizing Strategies, and Incorporating Higher Order Thinking Activities. I have used Moving Summarizations in both workshops, from the book Summarization in Any Subject by Rick Wormeli.

Moving Summarizations involves bringing content ideas to life through physical movement, by using the body to illustrate understandings of content. Participants in my workshops were given a series of 5 events, in which they had to put a movement to each event (working in groups). Other than the fact that the events had to be kept in order, there weren't any other rules.

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After taking about five minutes to put together their movements to represent the events, all participants stood up and showed their creation to the others. Everyone agreed that being in the audience was beneficial because they would remember more information (the events), but performing the simple movements was incredibly beneficial because they would remember their specific movement when they needed to recall the information. We all agreed that this type of activity lends itself very well with timelines.

Pick up Wormeli's book, do some research on Moving Summarizations, and give it a shot. It was quite easy.