Reading Guides
Preparation
Identify the text you want students to read, along with the primary ideas and information that you want students to learn and explore. Create questions and sentence completions that probe their understanding of these key concepts, and organize the questions and prompts according to the corresponding text page numbers.
Activity Steps
1
Teacher distributes and explains the reading guides.
Reading guides tend to be straightforward and don’t often require much modeling, but you should help students to understand at what points in the text they should stop to respond to questions. You may also want to model the sorts of responses you are looking for.
2
Alone or in pairs, students begin reading the text. They stop at designated points and respond to items on the reading guides.
As students are working you should circulate among them and engage them in mini-conferences, asking them about what they are noticing and what they are thinking and wondering. Help to push their thinking a little further.
3
Using their completed reading guides, students engage in a discussion about what they noticed and learned from the text.
Students can discuss the text in small groups or as a whole class. This is an opportunity for them to integrate what they have learned from using the reading strategies.
4
Alone or in groups, in conversation or in writing, students reflect on their learning process.
Students respond to questions including: · How did the reading guide affect your understanding of the text as you were reading? · How did the reading guide affect your ability to use the strategies you have learned? · How might you create your own reading guide? · What would you put on a reading guide to help yourself understand what you read?
