Lesson 5: Revisiting Information Sketchnotes 

Unlike live sketchnotes revisiting information sketchnotes means that you have already looked at the information:
  • Read a chapter, a read aloud, an article and did your normal close reading strategies.
  • Listened to a lecture live and took outline style notes
  • Watched a video or listened to a podcast and took basic notes down
Then you come back and revisit your close reading annotations, or your basic notes and create a sketchnote from that information and what you can remember additionally about the content. Because you are not sketching live you have more time to think about your structure and flow, to find images to represent your thoughts, and add additional information for connection and understanding. And obviously there is a lot less stress in terms of drawing and listening and getting everything down while you are live sketchnoting.

Your Task to Practice Revising Information Sketchnotes:

Read this article "Beware of Frogs" and then do a sketchnote. If you can print this out or copy the article onto your digital device. Highlighting and close reading annotations, like we model for our students, works well for this strategy. Once you have read the article and highlighted go back to your highlighted sections and create a sketchnote. You might find that with time your images can be more thoughtfully created and placed. 
The original document this story came from was an Engage NY Grade Four practice test.

Turn In Your Revisited Sketchnote Here!
True story time... During the spring of this year I was coordinating a big event where my team floods a school and teaches in every classroom that day over a couple hours time span. It is a big event, and this was not just my school event to coordinate but it was also my daughters school. It was a school that I have been called to work with repeatedly over the last four years. As I walked in to teach one of my lessons that day, intro to sketchnotes, that I had not only done this lesson with these students at the beginning of the school year, but I had also done the lesson with them a previous year. A couple of thoughts went through my head, how could I have missed this? And why did this teacher pick this lesson (they have a menu of lessons to pick from). 

Thankfully the students were finishing reading and annotating an article (the one used above) as I walked into the door. So thinking on the spot I thought- well why don't we go ahead and sketchnote this article. I had not read the article before, The kids had only read it once. It turned out to be a wonderful example lesson, so I am sharing it with you here. 

The teacher loved it, and it inspired the entire team to continue to work with sketchnotes and provide it as a test taking strategy to the students when they were reading their articles during the big state test. To me that is a win win! Below you can see my sketchnote and several of the students examples. Scroll to the bottom for some teaching tips!
1. While I was modeling this lesson there was a few things that I did to help the students. Off the top of my head I didn't know how to draw a simple frog. So I went to google in front of the students and searched "frog hand drawn." I was using my iPad pro so I used the multitasking feature and split the screen so I was drawing in procreate on the left taking up 2/3 rds of the screen, and had the image in google chrome on the right 1/3 the size.

2. I didn't know what a Northern Leopard Frog looked like, so we looked that up too.

3. The setting was in Minnesota so I pulled up a map of the state to guide us in our outline drawing, 

4. As I was drawing the splats of frogs on the road, one of the other teachers came in and asked if the blood of a frog was red (which was the color I was currently using). I asked the class... we didn't know. So we looked that up as well. Did you know their blood is green? I didn't! 

5. I also consulted the students for colors and species choices as I drew the fence, the flower, and the leaf. 

Drawing with your students is so important!