A neat idea I discovered this week was "Black Out". This is an activity created to help students discover the main idea of a story. Working in small groups, students each have an article to read. After reading the article, the students search through the article, and any information they find that is NOT pertinent to the article...not really all that important, they black out with a Sharpie. After this is done, anything that is left should be able to help the students formulate the main idea of the passage with maybe a few details sprinkled in.
To save on the amount of paper needed, this could be done with dry erase as well. Take the same printed out article, and insert it into a sheet protector or some other sort of overlay. The students follow the same procedure using a dry erase marker. After discussion, the overlays are wiped clean and ready for the next small group to use.
To make this a digital activity, assign the article from an online source--Newsela for example, then copy/paste the article onto a Google Doc, then choose "make a copy for each child" when it's loaded into the Google Classroom. The students can use the "highlight" color tool (choose black for the color) and work through it the same way. One bonus to using Black Out as a digital activity, is that it's a lot easier to undo when a student changes their mind about something that was highlighted.
If you'd like to learn more, check out this link for more information: Improve Reading Comprehension with Black Out
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