Wednesday, February 10, 2016

3-STEP No PREP Extended Reading Activity!

This has to be one of the easiest, no prep extended reading activities ever. You can use it with any text to which the students have access such as:
- a novel (after reading & discussing 1 chapter or several)
- a Movie Talk with an accompanying script 
- a class story with an accompanying script

Part 1
1. Students choose a partner. Students may use the text (book) or script (Movie Talk or class story) for the first part of the activity.

2.  Students write 3 sentences.  Two are TRUE and one is FALSE using the text.  They may copy the sentences directly from the text for the two true sentences.  For the false sentences, sometimes the only thing they will need to do is change a word or two in the text to make the statement false.

3. While students are writing their 3 sentences, the teacher uses a marker and writes a letter of the alphabet on each of their papers. (I had 14 groups so I wrote the letter A on one paper, B on another, etc.)

Students stay with their partners for Parts 2&3 of the activity.

Part 2
4. After students have written their 3 sentences, they tear off the bottom part of their paper and write the letters A-N (or however many groups you have). This paper will be their answer sheet.

5. The teacher directs students in which way they are going to pass the paper with the 3 sentences. They read the paper passed to them, decide which sentence is false, and write the # of the false sentence after the corresponding letter on their answer sheet.

When students have read all of the papers and decided which sentences were false, they hand the papers with the 3 sentences to the teacher.

Part 3
6. The teacher starts with paper A and the students call out which sentence was false. (I read the letter only and I did not read the three sentences. You could read the 3 sentences before asking students which was false, but the students had already read them one time and I wanted to keep the activity moving.)

7. The teacher reads the false sentence and then asks for a volunteer to change the sentence to make it true.

I told you it was an easy, no prep extended reading activity.  The best part is the students copied the sentences AND re-read a lot of the sentences from the text, which was my original goal.

9 comments:

  1. Great post! I will be finishing a novel with one of my classes next week and will use this as a review. I'm thinking I'll assign chapters to pairs to make sure they hit the whole novel.

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  2. I love this!! Thanks for sharing!

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  3. Oh my gosh! I LOVE this! My kids just got 1-to-1 this year, so I also turned it into a google form (http://po.st/TTF) and am using it today! Thanks for the great idea and visuals!

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    1. Love the google form idea. Thank YOU for including the link. :-)
      C. Hitz

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    2. You're so welcome!! Although I learned not to make every question required because they didn't have time to get to all of them, so that would be my main edit. At the end, I asked kids to reflect on the activity and a bunch of them really liked it! The only complaint was that they couldn't read their classmates' handwriting! ;)

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    3. "couldn't red their classmates' handwriting" - welcome to what we deal with every day, right? LOL
      Actually, some times when I'm writing comments on students' papers and if I mention the handwriting, I have to make sure my handwriting is legible. One time I was writing so fast that I noticed my writing looked messy so I ripped off that corner of the paper and rewrote it. I wanted to avoid the "pot calling the kettle black" scenario. LOL

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    4. I'm curious how the kids view their results when they complete the google form. I am imagining you get a spreadsheet of their answers - but what does the second part of this activiity (share out/check in and correct) work with a google form?

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    5. I do not know the name of the person that mentioned the google form and I don't know if that person will be notified when comments are written here (as they would on Twitter or Facebook), so it's likely you will not get an answer to your question. I have not tried it with using Google as the person suggested.

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