9/5 Today's Lesson: Making Predicitions By Activating Your Background (Prior) Knowledge

On Friday, we discussed the importance of predicting when we read as a reading strategy. This enables readers to interact with the text, by asking questions of themselves, the characters, the mood, and any thing else they recognize as being of importance to the immediate or general outcome of the book's plot.

INTRO
When we started the day, students answered the following questions:

1. What is a prediction?
2. Why is making a prediction important when you read?

CRITICAL READERS
Second, students were asked to challenge themselves about what critical readers practice when they read.

• Critical readers think about the story they are going to read before they start reading and as they read the story.
• Critical readers: Predict > Check the Prediction

PRACTICE PREDICTING
Then, we moved into practicing some predicting strategies. Using the book The Pigman, by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Paul Zindel, students examined the cover of the book and asked responded aloud to the question: What will happen next?

I asked for specific examples. Why? Because specific examples allow the student to both express their opinion by giving a specific example from the text. This is EXTREMELY important.
When students are asked to do the same on paper, they must explain their opinion by supporting it with facts directly from their observations in the text.

Next, I read from the first chapter of the book aloud. I stopped every now and then to ask them the predicting question: What do you think will happen next? Why?


INTERESTING QUESTIONS
Two of the most interesting questions to come out of my original question were: "Is the narrator a male or female?" (from me) and "Is the narrator white, black biracial, Latino?" (from students).

READING STRATEGIES
Finally, I discussed specific strategies they need to think about to be critical readers:

• We Problem Solve by reading ahead.
• We Predict & Confirm while reading.
• We read with fluency so it sounds like speaking.
• We read for punctuation clues so that we read with fluency & phrasing
• We re-read to maintain meaning
• We think about what we already know to understand the text.