A Delightful Pre-Reading Activity

 

One way of sparking students' interest in a text is to prepare various pre-reading activities for the students so that they wish to read further.

 

The following pre-reading activity requires students' background knowledge in order to do the task.

 

The most suitable text for this activity would be any informative text. E.g. I had a text on how GOLD was used in the past:

 

1. The teacher prepares 5 small slips of paper on which statements are written. E.g: Gold has been used for more than 600 years. T / F

2. The teacher sticks each T / F slip on the walls of the classroom.

3. The teacher asks students to stand up and answer the 5 T/F questions.

4. After answering the questions, students are asked to check their answers by scanning the text.

 

HAVE FUN!

 

 

Quotes

 

 

 

1. A classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

 

2. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

 

3. Put all your eggs in the one basket and—WATCH THAT BASKET

 

4. If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

 

5. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality

 

6. When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

 

7. It’s the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge,

 

8. Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age,

 

9. Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.

 

10. I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book. . . . The recipes were to be the routine ones: how to make dry toast, instant coffee, hearts of lettuce and brownies. But as an added attraction, at no extra charge, my idea was to put a fried egg on the cover. I think a lot of people who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right.

 

11. Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped

 

Student-generated Questions

 

Here is a student centered activity for any reading text but the text needs to have enough paragraphs so that every student can ask questions about those paragraphs.

 

Procedure:

 

1. Each student gets a slip of paper with a question number written on it.

 

2. Whatever number is written on the student's slip, the student has to read that paragraph and prepare a question about that paragraph. If you do it this way, then the questions are in the same order as the information that appears in the text. But if you want the students to ask questions about different paragraphs,then students can draw numbers from a bag and work on that paragraph. This means that the number on the slip of paper does not correspond with the paragraph number.This also means that the questions are not in the same order in which the information in the text appears.

 

3. After each student has written his/her question on the slip of paper, the teacher checks whether the question is correct or not.

 

4. After the teacher has checked the question, the student puts his slip of paper on the floor.

 

5. When all the questions are on the floor, each student takes a piece of paper and answers each question one by one by standing up and getting the slip and answering it and putting it back on the floor so that other students can also answer it. One option is that the students write the answers in their notebooks.

 

6. The teacher could also set a time limit. All the questions are checked afterwards.

 

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Have some fun activities/ideas?  How about worksheets, review sheets or songs?

Send your ideas to malloryforseth@gmail.com. Please include a short summary of the activity along with any worksheets or extra materials needed for the activity.