It’s not easy to develop the technical skill, precision, and decisiveness needed to become an excellent surgeon, but the first graders of Watson Comly Elementary School in Northeast Philadelphia were well on their way when they learned to perform their own “surgeries” earlier this year.
When brainstorming techniques to teach students to identify text features like titles and tables of contents, Hannah Levine suggested to her fellow teachers that they start off the second half of the school year with something fun and engaging — nonfiction text surgery. They knew the experience of dissecting an article to understand its pieces would be more memorable if the students could dress the part, so they reached out to Penn Medicine. That’s where Erika Davis, RN, a perioperative nurse at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center came in.
Like many of her PPMC nursing colleagues, Davis is always eager to engage in community outreach. With the enthusiastic backing of the OR team, she gathered extra surgical caps, gowns, and gloves for donation. Davis donated enough supplies to help Watson Comly’s 88 first graders properly get into the mindset to tackle their first surgery: cutting and pasting text features in order to identify the main point of an article.
Subbing in safety scissors and glue sticks for scalpels and sutures, each student meticulously extracted their text’s print features like large, bold text, informational aids like captions, organizational aids like glossaries, and graphic aids like photos and charts, then categorized them. Throughout the lesson, their teachers reminded them of the importance of being very careful and accurate like surgeons.
“We were inspired to turn a topic that can be a little boring into a hands-on learning experience. Our first graders practiced identifying different text features to understand them just as well as a doctor understands the human body,” Levine said. “They couldn’t believe they got to dress up, and they loved the activity. This project wouldn’t have been as exciting without Erika’s partnership!”