Learning Activities

In this activity students will preview a text and develop questions they think might be answered in the text. They will then see if the text answers their questions. The purpose of this activity is for students to anticipate what they will read and to generate interest in the text.

In this activity students survey the text and create questions they think the text was designed to answer. During reading, students will try to answer their questions. The questions help set a purpose for reading. This activity works particularly well with non-fiction texts.

This activity, where students draw and label a key scene in a text, works well as a pre-writing activity, and also as a reading comprehension activity. It helps students to develop a detailed visualization of a setting, and to attach words to the image.

This activity helps to lead students through the process of solving a mathematical word problem. Using a written guide, students focus on thinking about the problem at three levels: first literal, then interpretive, then applied.

Through this activity students learn to reorganize their notes to reflect the ideas and relationships embedded in a repertoire of common discourse patterns. Expository frameworks are the structures that commonly organize most types of nonfiction text, and students can learn to recognize and easily interpret these frameworks.

This activity helps students to think about narratives through a problem/solution lens, which helps them to appreciate and recall the sequence of events and the intentions and motivation of characters, and which helps them to engage emotionally with a text.

This activity helps students to structure the asking of different types of questions about a text. “QAR” stands for “Question-Answer Relationship,” and it is a way of conceptualizing the different types of questions students may ask about a text.

In this prediction activity students will use information from a partially written story as the foundation for the continuation of the story. Students will complete the story by first planning out a sequence of events based on the original story and then using that plan to write the middle and end of the story. The purpose of this activity is to help students understand sequencing of events and character development across time.

In this activity, students generate a set of questions about a text or unit of study, and write all the questions on index cards or sticky notes. Then, they sort the questions into two categories: “clarifying” and “higher order thinking (HOT).”

This activity helps students to generate connections, ideas, and reactions related to the key ideas of a text or a unit of study. Students go on a gallery walk, looking at and reading displays of key quotations or images drawn from the unit’s resources. They record their thoughts and reactions, then the class discusses the ideas generated. This activity is useful at the beginning of a book or a unit to activate background knowledge, and can also be used at any point during a unit to encourage broader and richer thought about a topic.

Reading guides can help to scaffold students in their application of reading comprehension strategies, and to support them in their reading and comprehension of complex texts. Teachers create questions and prompts that correspond to each section of a reading, and students complete the guides as they read. Reading guides can be targeted to any reading strategy, and can be a good activity to scaffold the use of a novel strategy. As students gain more proficiency, they can move towards using strategies without a guide, or creating their own guides.

In this activity, adapted from Gallagher’s Deeper Reading (2004), students analyze which characters in a text, or participants in a historic event, are most responsible for an outcome. They will assign a value to each character or participant and represent their responsibility in a pie chart. Each group will present and defend their values to the class. The purpose of this activity is to prompt deeper thinking about the actions of characters and the consequences of those actions. This activity works best with texts that carry a strong ending

This small-group activity helps students to encode and extend content presented in direct teaching or a text. Students are guided to work cooperatively to use their own words, experiences, and connections to generate novel summaries of presented content

This activity, which is a variation on the Question-Answer-Relationship activity, helps students to use questioning in a structured way, and to generate and distinguish among three different types of questions: questions whose answers are in the text, questions whose answers are in the world, and questions whose answers are in their heads. This classification process helps students to ask a wider variety of questions, to target types of questions to different learning contexts, and to answer their own questions effectively.

In this activity, adapted from Facing History and Ourselves, students will participate in a structured discussion. The purpose of the town hall circle is to provide a space for students to share different perspectives. The activity can work with any content area with differing opinions or perspectives.

This activity helps students to organize the process of planning and writing a narrative. The mnemonic SPACE (Harris & Graham, 1992) is an acronym that stands for: S: Setting P: Purpose A: Action C: Conclusion E: Emotions Through the use of this mnemonic, students can gain confidence and success at composing narrative pieces.

In this activity, adapted from Short, Harste, & Burke’s Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers (1996), students will read a text and select five statements that they think are important to discuss. On index cards, the students will write the statement on one side and then a comment on the other. In groups, students share and discuss. The student who shared the statement must comment last. The purpose of this activity is for students to engage more deeply with the text.

Students construct meaning from text with a partner during the Say Something activity, which is adapted from Beers’s When Kids Can’t Read (2003). Each student takes a turn to respond to an idea or line from the text by practicing a specific learning strategy such as questioning, making a connection, or clarifying an idea previously misunderstood.

This quick activity, adapted from Cris Tovani’s Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? (2004), allows students to reflect on their learning by engaging in active dialogue with their peers and/or teachers. Students respond to a focus question of the week, leaving room for written responses from a partner or teacher. Student responses may serve as entry points for lesson discussions, and opportunities for teachers to reteach content based on common misconceptions revealed in the activity. The focus of the Inner Voice Calendar can be solely academic or can include questions to understand the emotional needs of students.

This activity encourages students to develop their curiosity about a topic by asking authentic questions in the form of a poem. Using the poem “I Wonder” by Jeannie Kirby as a model, students express their own questions through the structure of a poem.