Pre-reading Activity w/ Sketches

My Spanish 2 classes are piloting Karen Rowan's book "El Secuestro de José".  Since it is in manuscript form, it does not have a teacher's guide available yet. In order to make it interesting and comprehensible, I have been trying different activities.

Today we did a pre-reading exercise for the last chapter.  After we completed the pre-reading activities, I read the chapter to the students, stopping after one or two paragraphs to ask students to summarize what just happened.  Thanks to the pre-reading activities, the students had no problems understanding the last chapter.

Pre-Reading Activity:

1.  I pre-read the chapter and chose 16 sentences that had vocabulary or grammar that I wanted to introduce or reinforce. I wrote those sentences on index cards and wrote a letter on each one, A-P.

2.  I sketched (and there are some rough looking sketches) the 16 sentences.  Sometimes I have the students sketch the pictures but I didn't want to use class time for that today. (I didn't put numbers on the sketches, but rather wrote the numbers next to the sketches on the board - see the photo above.)

3. In class, I put the 16 sketches on the board, grouped in fours and numbered them, and told the students it was from chapter 16 of the book.  Students had to either write or tell me sentences that describe the sketch.  I did this activity in three of my Spanish 2 classes.  If I saw the students were struggling, I told them to work in a group of 3 to brainstorm ideas together.  In each class, I had them write at least one time to describe a group of 4 sketches because I wanted to see their individual progress, but most of the sentences were done verbally.

4. Then students numbered their papers 1-16.

5. I taped the 16 sentences that I had written on index cards on the board and students matched the sentences to the sketches. 

6. To go over the answers, I asked who knew the answer for #1.  The student told me the letter; I put it under the sketch; and then the student chose a classmate to translate the sentence to English.

After the above activities were finished, we read the chapter.

If you are willing to share any pre-reading activities that you do when reading mini-novels, I would appreciate reading about them.  The more variety in types of activities, the better!