#SummerPD: Cross-Content Reading Strategies

 

Although many of the strategies that were presented during this summer PD workshop have been around awhile, I was encouraged by several that I hadn’t heard of before, or that were tweaked in a way that made them fresh.

ABC Brainstorm

This activity (and any variations of it) is meant to help students activate their prior knowledge about a topic. It’s a visual tool that can be done as a pre-assessment before a unit begins, added to throughout a unit, or as a culminating activity to wrap up a unit of study, making it a valuable study guide.

You can use a preprinted graphic organizer for younger students, or simply have older students write the letters of the alphabet down along the margin line of a piece of composition paper. Each version leaves space for students to write words or phrases associated with the given topic that begin with each of the letters of the alphabet.

You could decide to have students work independently at first, or to pair up in partnerships or small groups from the beginning. Once they’ve had a chance to record their list of words and phrases, students should be asked to share out, so that others can add to their list.

If you use interactive notebooks in your classroom for social studies and science, you could have students add this list to their notebooks. You might decide to color-code it with words added before in red, words added during the unit in blue, and words added at the end in green, for example. There’s a lot of possibilities with these!

 

Double-Entry Journals

 

Double-Entry Journals have been traditionally for middle-school students, but can be used at the elementary level with support. They enable students to record their impressions of the text as they read, enhancing their engagement with it. While the upper-level journals are more open-ended, you could scaffold it by creating an anchor chart of suggested items from the text and possible responses, or give them specific quotes from the text and prompts or questions to answer.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are similar to Double-Entry Journals in that they help students stop throughout their reading to consider its meaning. They can be used effectively with new vocabulary in nonfiction text, and as with the journals, students can self-select the words, or terms can be chosen for them.

I use my bookmarks to support my students’ understanding of text elements we’ve covered in our reading workshop and guided reading lessons, and keeps students accountable for their independent reading. 

 

Anticipation Guides

One of my favorite strategies that was discussed at my workshop was the use of Anticipation Guides. They can help stimulate students’ curiosity about a new topic in content areas. They can be used in both fiction and nonfiction, but in the area of expository text, these guides can get students involved by having them think about their opinions on certain topics in social studies, for example. A more common way to incorporate anticipatory guides is to state accurate and incorrect “facts” about a topic and have students respond whether they believe each to be true or false. This serves as a type of K-W-L.

I’ve used these guides without the paper-and-pencil as a way to get kids moving. I have my students all line up on one side of the room and instruct them to walk to the other side if they disagree with a comment that I read, to stay where they are if they agree, and to move to the middle of the room if they neither agree nor disagree. I’ve used it with the picture book Voices in the Park, asking my students prior to reading it whether they agreed or disagreed with how a person handles a situation that they would eventually find out happens in the story. They become quite surprised when their initial perception isn’t always their only view!

These, of course, are only a fraction of the many strategies teachers use to support their students with cross-content reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you utilize these strategies in a unique way in your classroom!

Check back for my next #SummerPD topic: