Activating and Connecting: Activities
Tea Party:
Problematic Situations:
Possible Sentences:
Knowledge Rating Scale:
- Serves as a pre-reading activity designed to pique students' interest. Each student receives an index card containing important words or phrases taken verbatim from a text. The selected words and phrases should provide insight into different aspects of the text, although some should have the potential to be interpreted in multiple ways. Students must use prior knowledge and problem-solving skills to make predictions, formulate inferences, and establish cause-and-effect relationships. Once individual students have had an opportunity to reflect on their portion of the text, they circulate around the room, comparing their cards with each other in an attempt to draw connections among idea. It is important to encourage students to discuss their cards one-on-one rather than in groups so that meaningful conversations that encompass both viewpoints can occur. After they have time to interact with multiple students, the classroom is broken into groups where they create "We think" statements that predict what the text will be about. Groups then share their statements with the class, discussing the thinking that went into creating the statements.
Problematic Situations:
- Problematic Situations support inquiry based learning in that students are presented with a problem and are asked to work individually or collaboratively to brainstorm possible solutions and then decide upon the best solution to the problem. This activity typically stimulates interest in the content of study and helps to build background knowledge for the upcoming unit. Once students have spent sufficient time exploring the problem and possible solutions, they will have a purpose for reading the tests the teacher has selected for the unit.
Possible Sentences:
- Possible Sentences is an activity that will familiarize students with new vocabulary words and help to arouse students' curiosity. In this activity, students make predictions about what they will be reading as they think about the relationship among new words.
- Select the core vocabulary words from the reading selection.
- Write and say each word. Ask students to write and say the words as well.
- Instruct students to select pairs of words and write a sentence using those pairs. Their sentences should be "possibly sentences" that will appear in the text they are going to read.
- Have students share their sentences as a whole or small group, and discuss the sentences for plausibility.
- Have students read the text to check the accuracy of their sentences.
- After reading, students will need to discuss in their groups whether any of their sentences need to be corrected.
Knowledge Rating Scale:
- The knowledge rating scale activity is a great way to have students asses their own understanding of a word or concept prior to reading. In this activity, students rate their perceived knowledge of a word by indicating whether they know it well, have heard it before, or have no clue. Following this individual assessment, students discuss the words with a small group and then as a whole class until everyone has a working definition as they begin the reading. This discussion is also an opportunity for the teacher to correct any misconception and/or to guide students' definition to "fit" the way it is used in the text.
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Word Clouds:
- Word Clouds can be used to visually represent text. In a word cloud, the words or data used most frequently will appear larger than the other words on a page. Word clouds may be effective as a way to introduce vocabulary, summarize large sections of a text, explore students' pre and post understanding or definition of a concept, an anticipation guide in which students attempt to guess the plot of a story or focus of a chapter, to make a presentation. These are just a few examples, and you make recall other that have been used in this book or in the classroom.
- http://www.wordle.net/