Learning Activities

In this activity students will write a poem that synthesizes information that they have read. Each stanza of the poem represents a different view of a character or an event. The purpose of this activity is to explore multiple viewpoints and synthesize those views.

Through this activity students create acronyms to assist in remembering a process, list, or set of facts. This process develops students’ metacognition, and helps them to become more mindful and effective in their studying.

This activity teaches students to monitor the relative difficulty of text, and to adjust their reading rate to support comprehension of text at various levels of difficulty. The activity allows students to practice metacognition and self-monitoring, and the process of adjusting reading rate can ultimately become automatized so that students are better equipped to process text at any level of difficulty.

Anticipation guides consist of statements about themes from a text and ask students to evaluate their own thoughts about those themes. Anticipation guides help students build background when they think about ideas before they engage in a text. The guide also helps students to identify and connect themes as they read the text. Anticipation guides can be used to review and reflect on material at the conclusion of a text to see if the reading reinforced or changed students’ thinking. They can also be an effective prewriting tool to get students thinking about the themes of a text and their own understanding of those themes.

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

In order to communicate effectively, writers and speakers need to understand their audience’s interests, assumptions, and background knowledge. Skilled communicators must be able both to identify their audience and analyze its characteristics. This activity helps to develop the skill of audience analysis in students by guiding them to identify their core audience and determine its key features. The activity is used most often when students are planning a persuasive text.

Author Interview is an activity used to deepen readers’ understanding of character, plot, the author’s message, or theme. By questioning the author’s choices in narrative development, students consider
the author’s craft and the impact it has on theme. In this activity readers select the point of view of a character and develop questions from their perspective. They develop higher-level, open-ended questions about the author’s purpose for the development of specific character traits, or why the events
or conflicts that impacted them were written. Students can then answer their own questions from the point of view of the author, using their understanding of the text to make inferences. Alternatively,
students reading the same text can work in pairs taking turns pretending to be the author and responding to each other’s letters.

This activity provides a highly structured way for students to identify, organize, and process their reactions to a text. It facilitates students’ ability to react meaningfully to a text, and then to draw logical conclusions based both on their opinions and on the

In this activity, adapted from Harvey & Goudvis’s Strategies that Work (2007), students will create and use beyond-the-line questions that provoke deeper thinking and prompt lively student discussions. These are questions that can’t be answered with one or two words or by referencing a single line of text, but arise in complex moments of the text. The purpose of this activity is to extend and deepen thinking in response to inferential questions.

This activity helps students to find books that they are interested in reading, and that are at an appropriate reading level. It provides a structured way for students to examine many books in a brief amount of time.

In this activity, inspired by Burke’s The English Teacher’s Companion (1998), students will create a business card to represent a character from a reading. The purpose of this activity is for students to explore how audience and purpose shape writing. This activity is best used with a character from a novel or a historical figure.

Word Sort is a simple small group activity. Students list key words from a reading or a unit of study, or alternatively, the teacher may provide a list of terms prior to the sort. Students identify the meaning and properties of each word and then sort the list into collections of words with similar conceptual features. This sorting process draws links between concepts, and helps students to consider the interrelationships among concepts. Vacca and Vacca (1996) describe two forms of Word Sorts: • Closed Word Sort: The teacher provides the categories (and the specific features of each) to the students. The students then match the words with the features to create the word collections. • Open Word Sort: The teacher provides only the list of words. Students work together to discern the common features and to describe the categories for collecting the word groups.

Word Sort is a simple small group activity. Students list key words from a reading or a unit of study, or alternatively, the teacher may provide a list of terms prior to the sort. Students identify the meaning and properties of each word and then sort the list into collections of words with similar conceptual features. This sorting process draws links between concepts, and helps students to consider the interrelationships among concepts. Vacca and Vacca (1996) describe two forms of Word Sorts: • Closed Word Sort: The teacher provides the categories (and the specific features of each) to the students. The students then match the words with the features to create the word collections. • Open Word Sort: The teacher provides only the list of words. Students work together to discern the common features and to describe the categories for collecting the word groups.

This activity provides an organized and time-sensitive way for students to respond in multiple ways to a text as they are reading. By using a pre-established “code,” students indicate a variety of responses they may have to a text without significantly disrupting their reading.

Concept maps are a visual representation of interrelated ideas. Creating concept maps helps students to recognize and remember the hierarchical and horizontal relationships among words and ideas, and to represent these relationships both visually and cognitively. Concepts or ideas are written in bubbles and connected by lines as appropriate. Hierarchical relationships are represented vertically, and other interrelationships are represented horizontally. This activity helps students to consolidate and integrate areas of knowledge.

In this activity students will make connections between concepts/terms. The purpose of this activity is to help students better understand concepts and how they relate to each other. This activity is best used as a review of key vocabulary.

This activity provides a highly structured way for students to identify, organize, and process the connections they make with a text. Students are able to recognize and then categorize different types of connections: to their personal experience, to texts, and to the world.

This activity helps students to generate and classify questions at three levels: Gathering Information, Processing Information, Applying Information. This framework helps to expand and structure students’ questioning processes so that they can use questioning more effectively to support their learning.

In this activity students will draw and write a short description of something they just read. These drawings and summaries can serve as guides for students to go back and review events from previous readings to help with memory and comprehension of main ideas or key events.

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.

In this activity, students learn to use a graphic organizer to structure the process of drawing logical conclusions based on large quantities of information. It helps to guide students to make meaning out of information that might otherwise be overwhelming.

This activity immerses students within a particular format, genre, or style of work, and guides them towards recognizing its characteristics, features, and purpose. Using a jigsaw format, students analyze exemplars in pairs, then “teach” their exemplar to another classmate. Finally, students synthesize what they have learned about the format, genre, or style of work.

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.

Through this activity, students focus on the emotions and internal thoughts of an important character in a text. As they read, they imagine what a key character is feeling, and why. They annotate the text with notes and explanations about the feelings and thoughts. This activity can help students to identify more deeply with a character, and to better understand the intentions, motivations, and actions of characters in text.