Learning Activities

This activity helps students to organize the process of planning and writing a persuasive or opinion text. The mnemonic TREE (Harris & Graham, 1992) is an acronym that stands for: T: Topic sentence R: Reasons E: Examine reasons E: Ending Through the use of this mnemonic, students can gain confidence and success at composing opinion pieces

This group questioning activity helps students to learn effectively from a teacher presentation or a text. When engaged in Guided Peer Questioning, students are able to process, clarify, and extend the content of a presentation through structured interaction with their peers. The set of generic thought-provoking questions helps ensure that students will engage in deep thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation, and the transparency of the process helps students to develop metacognition.

This individual questioning activity helps students to learn effectively from a teacher presentation or a text. When engaged in Guided Self-Questioning, students are able to process, clarify, and extend the content of a presentation through structured individual work. The set of generic thought-provoking questions helps ensure that students will engage in deep thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation; the transparency of the process helps students to develop metacognition. Guided Self-Questioning is an individual version of Guided Group Questioning. It can be used as homework, students can use it in individual work following a presentation or reading, or students can use it as a form of note-taking to facilitate learning during a presentation or reading.

In this activity, adapted from Gallagher’s Deeper Reading (2004), the teacher provides students with a list of intriguing words from a text they will read. The students then read the words and write a prediction based on those words. The purpose of this activity is to help students prepare and to pique their curiosity for the text.

This activity, adapted from Barton and Heidema’s Teaching Reading In Mathematics (2009), helps students to develop their ability to solve math word problems by collaborating on problems as a group, and then communicating as a group the steps and thought process they followed. By describing their process both in speech and writing, students are able to clarify and solidify their understanding of the problem and its solution. In addition to improving math proficiency, this activity develops metacognitive skills.

Word trees are a visual representation of a set of words, with a branching structure demonstrating the words’ interrelationships. Words that are more frequently or strongly associated to a given word are displayed with thicker or larger font, so that word trees are able not only to show categorized associations, but also the strength of these associations. NOTE: Some people and computer applications use word trees to show the frequency with which words occur together in a text, and the trees are exclusively computer-generated. While this is not the basis of the current activity, as an extension it may be interesting to use an app to create a word tree like this for a studied text and then analyze it. In the current activity students should be linking and organizing words and ideas based on their own conceptual associations, not on frequency of occurrence within a text or spontaneous speech.

This activity, which has been adapted from Johns and Lenski’s Improving Reading: Strategies and Resources (2001), asks students to use a list of words or concepts to make a prediction about how the author may actually use them in texts. They verify or revise their predictions as they read the text.

In this activity, adapted from Gallagher’s Deeper Reading (2004), students will create a chart that includes the literal (what does it say?) and inferential (what does it mean?) comprehension of text. The purpose of this activity is to help students deepen their comprehension of difficult text.

The Second Chance activity, inspired by Burke’s The English Teacher’s Companion (1998), asks students to imagine alternate outcomes in a text. Students explore these alternate outcomes by examining cause-and-effect relationships and then manipulating causes in order to explore alternate effects, such as what if a character made a different choice. The purpose of this activity is for students to engage in the text on a deeper level. This activity is effective with both fiction and non-fiction texts.

“Semantics” refers to the concepts or ideas conveyed by words, and semantic mapping is a process through which students visually depict the ways ideas are connected. Semantic mapping can be used for a text or a unit of study. Through semantic mapping, students are able to represent the relationships among words and concepts, and in doing so they are able to reinforce the associations and categories that structure meaning. This activity helps students to organize, learn, remember, and extend their learning.

This writing activity challenges students to study example sentences drawn from literature, and then to write their own sentences, mimicking the form of the original. Students learn to appreciate and analyze both writer’s craft and sentence structure, and gain facility and confidence in writing complex and varied sentences of their own.

This students help students to recognize the key features of a text’s setting, and to understand how the setting of a text contributes to its meaning. As they read, they complete a graphic organizer that directs their attention to important aspects of the setting, and then asks them to think about each aspect of the setting is important.

In this activity students will take part in a Socratic seminar that includes preparing background information, speaking and listening during the seminar, and writing after the seminar. This activity can be used in all content areas.

“STAR” stands for “Student-Initiated Talk After Read-Alouds.” This activity, adapted from Block & Pressley’s Comprehension Instruction: Research-Based Best Practices (2001), supports student comprehension of read-alouds, by guiding student-initiated discussion of a text after the reading is completed. By giving students much of the responsibility for starting and sustaining the conversation, students are granted the opportunity to create their own meaning with limited teacher direction.

In this activity, students will create drawings that represent their five senses based on what they have read. The purpose of this activity is for readers to experience the text by using their senses to put them inside the text. This can help students to engage with the text on a new level, improve comprehension, and trigger memory. A simple graphic organizer with boxes for the five senses can be a useful tool for students to record their visualizations. This activity is appropriate for students of all levels and works best with specific scenes or chapters of a text, rather than at the conclusion of a novel. The important facet of the visualization storyboard is that it does not just focus on what students see, but on all five of the senses.

In this activity, adapted from Gallagher’s Deeper Reading (2004), students will explore theme through a variety of media. After students have finished a novel they will identify one of the themes of the novel. After they have identified the theme they will watch a movie with a similar theme and find an example of the theme in some other medium (song, poem, or art) with a modern focus. The purpose of this activity is to help students make the high-level thematic connections between the text and other media.

Thought Bubbles are effective ways for students to be aware of what they are thinking and how they are processing new information. It also gives teachers opportunities to assess students’ understanding of content and correct misconceptions associated with new learning. As described below, this activity can be used to illustrate the thoughts and motivations of characters in a text. However, it can be adapted to many other uses, such as helping students describe their thinking while solving a problem or receiving new information.

The purpose of this activity is to provide an opportunity for students to gain a deeper understanding of the time period in which the text is set. Students will use questioning strategies to interview people who have some familiarity with the specific time period. Students will select an interviewee, create a list of interview questions, and then produce a piece of writing that summarizes and reflects on the interview. This activity works best with a text based in a recent historical time period (within the last 20-50 years). The text does not necessarily need to be a piece of historical fiction, but can be any text set in a historical time period.

Visual timelines are similar to traditional timelines, but include images or drawings. They are one tool to help students with the sequencing of events. They can be an effective tool for analyzing a piece of text by identifying the arc of a story, charting character development, or tracking specific events over the course of time. Visual timelines can also be helpful to students as a precursor to writing their own stories; they can sequence events or character development over time. They can be paper-based or electronic and include drawings by students or images they pull from online sources.

This activity helps students to organize and remember important and distinguishing information about key people, places, or other ideas from their reading.