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During Reading Strategies -- Post-its

By Tim Pappageorge

DURING READING STRATEGIES

In his book, Subjects Matter, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels identifies a couple of dozen reading strategies to boost metacognition. Here is a short list of some of the during-reading strategies he mentions, and each has a strong research base.

  • Think Aloud
  • Reading Aloud (Pairs)
  • Dramatic Role Play
  • Post-it Response Notes
  • Annotating Text
  • Coding Text
  • Sketching my way through the text
  • Where do you stand?


EXAMPLE POST-IT NOTES
This week, I chose to use the post-it note activity with the novel, The Things They Carried.


  • Students identified key nouns/objects from the chapter.  In LARGE letters.
  • Students wrote associated feelings with each, noting the importance for the text: around the key objects, they wrote associated connotations. What associations can be made with each? What are the connotations concerned?
  • Students then posted these on the board, and a group of students sorted them and explained what each group has in common (list-group-label) as well as what it reveals about the chapter.
  • The students explained their groupings to the entire class in a discussion that followed.





Reflection: The goal of the activity and the discussion is to guide students to do some explaining and boosting of their associations with the text. If they can explain why the textual details matter to the feel of the text, then they will develop empathy and understanding for the characters in this war novel and also for the topic of PTSD, which is critical for the author's purpose.

I was satisfied by the choices that the students made as well as their ability to explain the details and connections across details. Although post-its are usually used with textbooks that cannot be written in, I selected the activity here because the post-its could be easily moved and grouped in order to facilitate a more concrete discussion of tone and character. Finally, this opening chapter of the novel can be a blitz of details that can overwhelm and confuse a fist-time reader of the novel, so the activity helped to give the students some handles on the book to grasp.

 

     

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