Spooky Pre-Reading Practice

For a review, we quickly go over all the ways we can get our brains ready to read. As a challenge, I ask them if they can use those pre-reading strategies before they know what book they are reading. We talk about how these strategies help us and that the best way to use them is to know what we are reading.

However, today we are going to practice some Before Reading strategies  and they won't know the book or what it's about.

For this activity, we are going to Activate Our Prior Knowledge to prepare us for reading and listening. I have them take out their white board and create a T-Chart. I do not want them to label the T-Chart because it will take out the fun and the shock that comes later.

For the label on the right side I have them write the word Adoption. I then give them about 3 minutes to write down what they know about adoption. I then ask them to share their notes and students can add anything out their chart that they remembered when hearing others ideas.My student can up with some very clever thoughts, "adoption is when you get a new pet," and "it's when a a parent can not raise their kids so they get a new family." I try to help clarify any misconceptions and have them talk through their thoughts.

Here comes the SPOOKY part and where the kids really get confused. They all have a clue that the character in the story might be adopted. I ask them to write down the word Graveyard for the other side of the T Chart. I now give them time to write down all they know about a graveyard.  We then share the ideas they came up with and talk about misconceptions. I noticed that students needed some vocabulary for items related to a graveyard.