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Teaching Elementary Students How to Make an Outline for Steps in a Process

Learning how to describe an activity or process benefits students in multiple ways. Students will learn to distinguish between important and trivial information and develop their communication skills. Use students' interests and familiar activities to make the process of creating an outline more engaging.
  1. Making a Sandwich

    • Demonstrate a common procedure, such as making a sandwich, for students. Ask students to list the steps for making the sandwich and write them on the board or a piece of chart paper. Then follow the steps exactly as students have listed them to make the sandwich. In most cases, the students will leave out key steps or put them in the wrong order, leading to a humorous results. Use those humorous results to explain to students the importance of including relevant details in an outline and placing them in the correct order.

    Teaching the Class

    • Help students choose a skill to teach the class and create an outline to go along with their lesson. Some skills could include doing a cartwheel, using a hula hoop or making a favorite food. The outline will help the students keep to the point as they present their skill to the class, and will provide students interested in learning the task with a reminder of the presentation.

    Classroom Procedures

    • Create posters that outline activities students do in the classroom on a daily basis. For example, you could make a poster explaining how to sharpen a pencil in the middle of class, or how to line up for recess. This activity has the side benefit of helping reinforce classroom rules that may have been forgotten since the beginning of the school year. Place students in small groups and have them help make the poster, assigning a different activity for each group to describe.

    Visual Aids

    • Use visual aids and unique presentation formats to help students explain a process. For example, write the steps for how to make a pizza on a piece of construction paper designed to look like a pizza, with each slice representing a different step. Instead of a poster, cut out or draw pictures of the different steps in the process and glue them onto index cards, then have students place the index cards in order.

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