Our War on Pronouns and the Disappearing Main Idea

     I am a looping teacher.  This is my second year with this group of students.  In fourth grade I used the term "TTQA" ("turn the question around") to help students construct better answers.  As fifth graders, they started to get a bit sloppy about TTQA, so it was time for a new angle.  During a grammar unit on pronouns I introduced the term antecedent.  An antecedent is a noun that occurs before a pronoun.  Pronouns should never be used in front of nouns.  So I declared a war on pronouns without antecedents.  The student made the posters which are displayed in the front of the room which show pronouns are not welcomed here!

     Task cards are one of my favorite teaching tools.  They are flexible and great for small groups and centers.  Recently I purchased these summary task cards on Teachers Pay Teachers. Although the directions for them said "Summarize this paragraph in twelve words are less.", I wanted to do something a little more fun and challenging with my student who has difficulty in this area.  I had him roll the dice to determine how many words his summary had to be.  This made him work a bit harder.  He found that the less words he could use the harder it was to summarize and the more he had to use his own words, but that lead to some great conversation that helped him gain some insight in this valuable skill.