Reading activity with Year 12 DVC class

During our staff PD a couple of weeks ago, we had a presentation from our literacy expert, Mr Marc Milford. We went through some reading and understanding activities ourselves in groups.  What Marc then wanted us to do was to put together the main activity for one of our classes with an emphasis on content from our subject areas.

I decided to focus on my Year 12 group, as they have to write their own overview of the design era they are researching. They always have problems with this ands tend to sneak a lot of "copy and paste" in.
I structured the activity around a design era that none of the students had chosen which was the 1970's.
Here is the link to the hand out that was given to the students to work through.

Here is the link to Marc's site that he shared with us that contains the literacy and reading sample activities.

Scanning

Sort the words into the boxes

Style	Materials
Type of product	Description / Describing
Write a one sentence prediction I think this text is about

Marc came down to the class to present the activity to the students, which was great as this was my first time doing this kind of reading content with students, so that gave me more confidence.
The class tried hard with the activity and I thought they focussed on it quite well. Both Marc and I were working with small groups as they got on, explaining modelling what they needed to do.




After talking to March both during and after the activity, it is going to be a good idea to do this type of work a few more times with less scaffolding as we go on. They need to be able to read a text and sort out their own key words to guide a summary write up. We are not there yet but it was a good start.