Pre-reading activities, like other visible thinking protocols, are about equity and access. If our goal as educators is to empower our students to comprehend (and enjoy!) the books they read, it’s our responsibility to provide them with pre-reading activities that activate schema. Schema are general ideas about a topic or text (otherwise known as background knowledge). They allow readers to have something that they can relate new information back to in order to make sense of it. Pre-reading activities help readers activate schema because they give students something that they can connect the text they read back to, as they embark on reading it.
Kylene Beers has been my literacy guru ever since reading When Kids Can’t Read What Teachers Can Do in my Teaching of Reading class in graduate school. This book is chock full of practical pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities that can be implemented with any text. Here are my favorite ones- they work for any book (and for pretty much any genre)!
Anticipation Guides
Provide students with a list of theme statements that relate to the book they're about to read. Give them columns where they can share if they agree / disagree OR make it a spectrum activity where one side of the classroom is labeled "AGREE" and the other side "DISAGREE. Read each statement aloud and have the students line up based on how they feel. I suggest emphasizing that we don’t always feel strictly one way or another and that nuanced opinions are essential. Encourage students to label how they feel on a spectrum (to stand in between agree/disagree, and at different distances) and/or have them share why they agree/disagree in writing and/or discussion. Clearly there are so many ways to do this one!
Tea Party Protocol
Kylene Beers wrote about this activity in When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do. Choose random (but meaningful!) quotes from the book. Type and cut them up, and hand each student a quote card. Then, have them walk around talking to one another about their quotes and make predictions about what the book will be about!
Cover Art Analysis
Judge a book by its cover! Have students quietly observe the cover art and write down what they see. Then, have them write down and/or share inferences they can make about the book based on what they observe in the cover art. Visible thinking protocols like See/Think/Wonder are great for this activity.
Pair any of these visible thinking routines with Storyshares decodables or high-low books to take your upper grade literacy instruction to the next level!