"How to Bartle Puzzballs"

At the beginning of the year our RAISSE representatives introduced an activity that I used with my class. At that time I was having trouble getting on the blog. Now, looking back at my journal, I wanted to share that experience. The students each got a copy of the reading selection. It includes gibberish words that create a paragraph that make no sense. Then there are questions about the passage. After giving them a chance to read the passage and letting them laugh and share their first impressions about it, I asked the question, "How many of you have ever read a passage with real words and felt like you had no idea what you just read?" All hands shot up. I asked, "What do you usually do about it?" Some answers included, "Just forget about it!" "Go on to something else." "Wait for the teacher to explain it." Then someone said, "Read it again." Yay! So I put them in groups and charged them to read it over and over again, try to decide what the gibberish words stood for, and reword it so that it made sense. After about 15 minutes, we came back together as a class. We went through the questions together, and tried to answer them using word placement, parts of speech, and guessing the meanings of words. Then we brainstormed strategies for comprehending what we read. Some of the suggestions were to read the passage at least five times, look at the words you already know (the little words) and try to figure out what the other words mean, look at the parts of speech to tell whether a word is a noun, verb, a name (proper noun), etc…, find the definitions of words, do some research on the topic, and many more. Then I suggested that they should try these strategies whenever they come across a passage that they don’t understand after reading the first time. It seemed to make a lot of sense to them. We have touched back on these strategies from time to time, but I think I could do more with the activity next time.
Vicky J