A Reading Strategy That Makes Students Want to Read

As an 8th grade social studies teacher I have my students do quite a bit of content reading in class. Unfortunately, as we all know, much of that reading can be quite dry, or dare I say...boring. Therefore, I am always on the look out for reading strategies that are easy to implement in the classroom.

One reading strategy that I have always had great success with are Anticipation/Reaction Guides. These guides can be easily created and can be used for any type of reading.

All the teacher needs to do is create 5-10 statements based on the text the students are about to read and ask students to agree or disagree with each statement. Next, have students work in pairs or in groups to discuss their responses. All of this is done prior to reading. It is not until after students have discussed in their small groups that they can begin reading.

After students have completed the reading, the students then revisit the 5-10 statements and determine once again whether or not they agree or disagree. And, of course, students then share their response in their small groups followed by a class discussion.

I usually set up my Anticipation/Reaction Guides with three simple columns. The first column is a "before reading" column to agree or disagree with the statements, the middle column is where the statements are actually written, and a final column is for "after reading" for the students to, once again, agree or disagree.

This activity can address lower-level thinking skills or higher level thinking skills by simply changing the statements the teacher creates. For lower-level thinking the statement can simply be a true or false statement. This works well when the teacher just needs a quick activity to spark student interest and yes, this really does spark student interest as the students are eager to read just to determine if they were right. However, if the teacher would like to address higher-order thinking skills then the teacher simply needs to create statements that provoke discussion and initiate critical thinking. In other words, statements that do not necessarily have a right or wrong answer.

Either way, what's great about these Anticipation/Reaction Guides is that it makes my students actually want to read, and as any teacher knows, that is more than half the battle.