Before Reading Activities:
Intra-Act Activity
The Intra-Act activity is one that helps to set students up for reflective thinking and discussion later on. In this activity, students read statements about important subtopics in the text section, and will mark if they agree or disagree with the statement. The students will then predict what their table mates will respond with, and then share what they marked down, leading to a debate on the topic. The purpose of this is to get students geared to the major topics within a text section, while also sparking inquiry, discussion, and debate over the text content.
Anticipation Guide
Anticipation Guides have students responding to statements and/or questions prior to them reading a text or text section. The placement of this prior to reading is vital, as it gets students primed for the content they’ll be experiencing in the text or text section. The purpose of this activity is to help activate prior knowledge that the students might have, as well as illustrating key themes within the text, as well as with American history and history as a whole.
K-W-L Chart
The K-W-L chart is an activity that pertains to before, during, and after reading a text or text section, but I see it being most important for before reading a text. Before reading, the students quickly fill in information in the chart for information they already know, the moves on to writing down information on this topic that they want to know, and then finishes with them writing down what information they learned on the topic they wrote about. The purpose of this strategy is to activate student prior knowledge on content related to the section that they are interested in, thus hoping to foster student interest in the content of the text or text section.
