Powerful Predictions
A Pre-Reading Strategy to Support Comprehension
Stage of Literacy Development:
Stage 1: Beginning LiteracyStage 2: Consolidation / Fluency
Stage 3: Literacy for Growth
Ages:
6-9
Grade Range:
2nd 3rdFood Groups:
Primary: Reading Comprehension Strategies
Secondary: Motivation for Literacy
Transcript
Teacher: Last night I stopped at the bookstore. All of a sudden over the system I heard, author Janell Cannon is presenting her new book. Crickwing, is by Janell Cannon. Stellaluna is by Janell Cannon. So I went to the back and I saw her there with her new book and she said, "Well, I have a new one but I'm not going to tell you the title of it. But what I will do for your class is give you six words from the story book, and I'll give you a copy of the book, but I've wrapped it up for you." So, you can't see it before you look at the six words. The first word she gave me was jungle. What might we know? [Student's Name]? Student: One of the settings will be a jungle. Teacher: She then gave me another word: Python. What do you think our story might be about? [Student's Name]? Student: There's a jungle and in that jungle there's a python snake. Teacher: Excellent! Lazy. What do you think the problem in this story might be? Remember, we are predicting so we're just guessing. [Student's Name]? Student: One of the animals that lives in the jungle will be a python and the python was so lazy that he doesn't do any work. Teacher: Does somebody want to come up and flip it for me? [Student's Name] come on up. Flip it for me. So now we have jungle, python, lazy, plummeting, healed and climb. And because we have python and jungle, we have somebody under characters and something under setting, could there be more characters in this story though? So when you go back to your desks to do your outline of your story elements make sure you are using all your six words. Now that you have returned to your desks and you have your six words that you can use for your story elements, I'm going to hand the sheets out and you can get busy on that. Would any of you like to come up to our author's chair and share what you have written down? [Student's Name] why don't you come up? Student: My character is a python, python's friend and his wife. My setting takes place in the jungle. The problem is that in the jungle a python is lazy and because he is lazy he was sleeping on the tree upside down but suddenly he fell. Then the python's friend saw him fall. His friend brought him a cure to heal him. He got healed like magic. Teacher: Excellent work! Now we get to actually open our book, which is very exciting because I haven't seen it either. Let's see. Verdi: About a Python. I'm very excited to actually read the story so we are going to begin that right now. On a small tropical island, the sun rose high above the steamy jungle...
Related References
Activity Objective
The goal of Powerful Predictions: A Pre-Reading Strategy to Support Comprehension is to help students make predictions about the content of a book based on key vocabulary. This teacher introduces students to a new book by introducing six words from the story that students use to make predictions about what the story might be about. The teacher then asks students to create an outline for the book based on these predictions, before even reading the first page. Finally, she ends the activity with actually reading the book to the class.
Quick Tips
Additional Comments:
- Asking students to write an outline before reading the book is a creative and fun approach to activate students' comprehensions strategies. - Think about asking for some volunteers to read their outlines to the class before reading the book. - After reading the book, ask students to reflect on how their outline differs from the actual story and how including other vocabulary words may have changed their predictions.
