During and After Reading Strategies

Soooo its been a while! I have been so busy working in my classroom, enjoying the summer and working at my part time job that I haven't been able to post like I would like too! A few weeks back I was a guest blogger on Amanda's blog read my post here! In the post I discussed Before, During, and After reading strategies to use to aid student comprehension. Today I am going to share a couple of my favorite During Reading and After Reading Strategies.

One of my favorite strategies to use during reading is DRTA or Directed reading Thinking activity. In this activity, students skim a reading selection. They view the title, headlines, illustrations, captions, sidebars, etc. Then students make predictions about what they will be reading about. The most important part when having the students make predictions is to identify how they reached this conclusion. After making predictions, the teacher picks a "break point" and has the student read independently to that point. At this point students can confirm or change their predictions. This process is repeated until the story is finished.

Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest) is my absolute favorite reading strategy! The kids absolutely love it!!! In this strategy, both the students and the teacher read a paragraph or section of a story. after reading the passage, the teacher first asks the students questions about what they just read. Then the teacher and students both read the second paragraph or section. This time the students get to ask the teacher questions about what was just read. Students have to comprehend what they read enought to formulate a question and know if the teacher got it correct. This is also a great time for the teacher to model how to go back in a selection and look for answers if someone doesn't know the answer to a question. The students love this because they always try to stump me!

After reading strategies are a great summative assessment for student comprehension. My favorite after reading strategies usually require some sort of group or whole class effort. My two favorite strategies are: Graffiti Board and Carousel.

Graffiti boards are fun because they are colorful and messy and allow for student creativity when writing. I always encourage my students to think of fun ways to write on the Graffiti wall, veritical, diagonal, different colors and sizes. Graffiti boards can be used with any topic. During reading, I will write the name of a story we read on the top of the graffiti wall then students will graffiti everything they remember from the story.

Carousel is very similar to graffiti except that I put students in groups and place charts through out the room with different ideas from the story, and students write and brainstorm as much as they can about the topic on each poster. Each group is given 30 seconds to a minute at each poster and then they rotate to the next poster.

Get the full length document of BDA strategies by clicking the image below! Enjoy!