Teaching kids how to paraphrase

Paraphrasing is quite a hard skill to master for some kids, but it is a very important skill in writing.

Children who do not learn to paraphrase will most probably resort to plagiarism and non of their work will be their own - they will just keep using the copy and paste function and learn nothing from this whole process .

image source

Paraphrasing is not just changing a few words, it is making the piece you read your own.  Look at the example below

            

image source

How to teach children step by step to paraphrase

1. Start off by just talking - because paraphrasing is putting something in your own words, start off by having the child answer questions in the own words.  They can be divided into pairs and questions like What is your favourite food and why?  What did you do after school yesterday?  The first student answers the question and the second student must change the answer into his/her own words.  Then they can trade places.
2. Paraphrase together - work with your students and try and paraphrase a sentence or paragraph together.  Everybody has an input and the best one is chosen.   You can also give some descriptions and the learners must give one word for the description or a synonym for a given word (you can find some examples on http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises/school/paraphrasing.htm)
3. Make sure your students know the difference between paraphrasing and summarising. 
4. Teach them the stragedy of the 4 R's that can be used

• reword - replace words and phrases with synonyms whenever you can.
• rearrange - you can rearrange the words to make new sentences or rearrange the ideas in the piece.
• realize - some things can not be changed like names and dates and titles etc., but you can arrange them in a different order.
• recheck - make sure that your paraphrased piece carries the same meaning over as the original piece and you did not use your own opinion for certain aspects.

image source

You can now go on to independent exercises.  They can start off by doing a paragraph at a time and then carry on to full articles.

For extra information and help, you can watch the video