Preview a Chapter

I have had the chance to go to many great in services and conferences and learn different pre-reading strategies. I think these are the hardest to develop and some of the most important things there are for students to learn. My favorites are the stem starters and the word sort. Stem starters are a series of questions, such as How did ____adapt to the environment? What circumstances led to the changes in the lives of ____? What contributed most to ______? What waas the status of ____ before/after the ____? The students can go through the book and find words to fill in the blanks and then answer the questions. Word sort is where you find the important terms from the chapter and have the students sort them into any groups they want, and then justify why they did that. I have them repeat this a few times, using different categories. From there, I have them create a visual of the words and categories, such as a wordle.