Boil It Down – Active Learning Strategies

Activity aim: To get students to review notes; to get students to synthesize the most important “takeaways”; to model a study strategy

Materials: Class notes, index cards (or a small piece of paper), and Post It notes (or even smaller pieces of paper)

Activity description:
Boil it Down is a strategy that encourages students to condense their notes about a specific reading passage and identify the most important facts. There are essentially three “writing assignments,” and each one requires students to write less.

During a lecture portion of a class, students should take notes as they normally would, or they should fill in interactive notetaking guides. After it ends, students will then transfer the most relevant and important information to the middle-sized card (which they can compare with other students in the class), and then to the smallest card:

A large index card, a medium-sized index card, and a small post-it note which students use to condense and synthesize their class notes — From Lindsey Cain’s “Literacy Strategies for the Math Classroom”

The idea of this activity is to have students make judgments about what information is most important to be transferred to the smallest card and which information should be eliminated. These can later be used for studying or as notes on a test.

Not only is this strategy good for making sure students read the passage (or pay attention during the lecture), but it is also helpful for having students sort information and decide what is most essential.

In the math classroom (for example), this strategy can be applied during a lesson about the circumference and area of a circle. When this strategy is completed, students will have a valuable resource they can refer to when studying or as notes on a quiz or exam.

Adapted from Lindsey Cain’s Literacy Strategies for the Math Classroom

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