Reading Strategy: Book Pass

The Book Pass is a neat way to get students to look through many different kinds of texts in a short amount of time. You would use this strategy as an  introduction to a unit to build background knowledge, to choose a new reading book, or select research texts for a project.You want to choose books from many different genres, including poetry, research texts, novels, etc. You want these texts to be based on a certain theme.

What you do:
1. You can do this with either the whole class or small groups depending on the topic.
2. Once you have decided the grouping, you want to pass out the Book Pass sheet, and then explain to the students that they should write the authors name in the author box, the title of the text in the title box and either comments, questions or something they have learned through the book, in the comment box.
3. Give students 2-4 minutes to "sample" the book. Once the time is up, say "Book Pass" and have students fill in the boxes and pass the book to their partner.
4. When everyone has gone through the books, you can bring the class together and discuss some of the things they have learned as well as any comments or questions they have.

Reading Strategy: REAP

Read
Encode
Annotate
Ponder

In my content literacy class I had to give a lesson based on a reading strategy. My observation classroom does a lot of textbook reading so I thought the REAP strategy would be great for them.

What I did:
First I had students draw the four boxes with each letter separately written at the top of the boxes. In each separate box will be filled in with specific information relating to the letter in the box.

Next I had the students read by themselves, the first section of lesson two of the chapter.

Once they were done, we filled in each box together.

R box: the title of the section

E box: encode, which I had students write summaries in this box

A box: annotate, have students write notes about important aspects of the section they just read    include key terms

P box: ponder, have students think of questions they have based on the text as well as connections to other things they have learned from other classes

The first time around we filled in the boxes together. Once the students got the gist of what we were doing, I allowed the students to pair up, read and fill in the boxes themselves. When they were done we came back together to fill in my boxes that were on the smartboard.

I got to use smartboard with this lesson and it was so much fun!!

REAP reading strategy