I don’t know where I first read about the shrinking notes strategy for summarizing. It was our final lesson and my ELLs just wanted finals to be over and for school to be out. I needed an engaging activity to review the themes of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and remembered the shrinking notes. In groups, students wrote the big ideas of the novel on a large sticky note, narrowed them down to a medium sized notes and finally chose the three most significant ideas on a small post it. We then had a short discussion on each group’s choices, supporting ideas with textual evidence, of course.
