Welcome to Spotlight on Strategies Challenge!  Our S.O.S series provides help, tips, and tricks for integrating DE media into your curriculum.

Filling the Silence
PDF Version
*For a link to all the PDFs in this series click here.

Background
Instead of being asked to solve a problem, this strategy has students creating a story related to a video segment played without sound.  Students draw conclusions about the message of the author and then are asked to go a step further and create their own story of a similar theme or concept.

Example

• Have the opening scene of the video segment, The Cartoon Encyclopedia of Mathematics: Rounding, (CDN Subscriber) displayed in the classroom.
• The video will be played without sound as students interpret what they see.  Before pressing PLAY, ask students the following questions.
  • What do the numbers on the screen represent?
  • What mathematical operation is represented by the fraction? (addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division)
  • Perform the operation.
• Play the video segment WITHOUT SOUND, and ask students to check their division.
• Pause the video segment at 0:45 minutes.  Tell students that they will be seeing a situation related to division and fractions.  They will be creating a story problem after viewing the segment to relay what “fraction” or “division” is being portrayed in the segment.
• Play the remainder of the video.
• Allow students time to write a story problem and mathematical operation related to what they saw in the video segment.

Challenge

• Find a video segment that relates to a current unit of study.
• Play the video segment without sound and ask students to interpret what is being portrayed in the segment.
• Ask students to design a story problem or create a story that has the same theme as the content being portrayed in the video segment.

You can take the challenge by:

• Implementing this strategy and letting us know how it went by posting a comment below.
• Using this strategies in your grade level planning discussions and/or professional development and reporting your events. (Remember we consider an event anytime 3 or more educators gather together… doesn’t have to be in a computer lab… could be sitting around the lunch table)
• Photocopying the flier and distributing it in your colleague’s boxes and/or posting it to your own BulleDEN board.

To see other strategies in this series click here.  For a link to all the PDFs in this series click here.