Reading Strategies for
All Content Areas
Sharon Thurman
and
Jeanette Barreiro
Agenda
 Reading Strategies Anticipation Guide—Click
HERE
 Best Practice Methods Jigsaw
 Poll: You decide (Think-Pair-Share)
 Other Strategies
 Q&A
Anticipation Guide
 Benefits:
 Activates prior knowledge
 Requires readers to make predictions
 Engages important issues that will come up in the
reading
 Has readers enter a text thinking
 Should only take about 6-8 minutes of class time
 Have students respond to four to six questions or
statements using a true/false, yes/no, or
agree/disagree format.
 These should be big and open-ended. Use
words like “always” and “never” to make them
more extreme.
Anticipation Guide
 You can discuss these using a
think/pair/share format or go straight to the
reading passage.
 After reading, return to the anticipation
guide to see if students still agree with
original answers.
 **Lots of these can be found on the
Internet—you don’t have to create one
from scratch!!!***
Jigsaw
 Benefits:
 Time saver—”divide and conquer” method
allows students to hear oral summaries instead of
reading everything
 Forces readers to “reread” for the big
ideas/reactions/ connections
 Works with textbook chapters or articles
 Students are divided into small groups. Before
meeting in groups, they read their assigned
passage or article, then fill out a jigsaw form
which asks them to mark important parts of the
text, write three big ideas, and three
reactions/connections.
Jigsaw
 Next they meet with their group members,
compare notes, and come to consensus on the
big ideas and reactions/connections.
 Each small group shares these with the whole
class; this gives everyone an opportunity to hear
the summaries about several texts or sections of
a textbook chapter.
 During the group presentations, listeners should
take notes in order to understand the sections
they were not responsible for reading.
Poll Everywhere
 Benefits
 Anonymous—gets the readers actual
opinion, not the popular opinion.
 Quick
 Can be converted into a Wordle to see what
similar words crop up the most
 Link to Your Opinion poll:
 Code:
Think-Pair-Share
 Benefits—
 Having time to write things out prior to
discussion helps students feel comfortable
participating
 Working in pairs forces readers to actively
discuss instead of relying on the dominating
discussers in whole-class discussion
 You can be creative with this strategy.
Check out this LINK
Think-Pair-Share
 Have readers think and write on their own
prior to discussion (eg, Your Opinion
polleverywhere, QuickWrite, Moodle
Feedback, Ning, Edmodo)
 Discuss ideas with partner—be creative with
pairing up students
 Share pair’s main points with entire group
Wordle
 Benefits

Easy to use

Linked to many different websites—even
Facebook statuses!

The more a word appears in the text, the larger it
gets on the Wordle. This will help you see the
words that are mentioned most often in the
poll/answer. This shows both common
understanding and common misconceptions.

Great to use with new vocabulary—allowing
students to define new words without a
dictionary.
Other Strategies for
Content Area Reading
 Before Reading
 Brainstorming—Webbing, Wordle, Bubbl.us,
Stixy, ReadWriteThink.org interactives
 Anticipation Guide
 List-Sort-Label--In small groups, students take
a set of key terms (8-15) selected by the
teacher and sort them into
categories. (Optional) They can determine a
“gist” statement to predict what they believe
is a summary of the text. Finally, they can list
what they hope to discover or questions
based on the words they did not understand.
Other Strategies for
Content Area Reading
 During Reading
 Coding Text/Post-It Response (using Adobe
Reader)--Give the students a few codes to
use while reading. If the text is in a textbook,
the codes can be written on post-it
notes. For example:
 ✔ Confirms what you thought
 ? Confusing
 ! very important

→ something new or interesting
Other Strategies for
Content Area Reading
 During Reading
 Double Entry Journal--Students take notes as
they read. The right column is for important
ideas from the text. The left column is for
personal thoughts, questions, confusions,
reflections, or reactions.
 Jigsaw
 Literature Circles—Using nonfiction
tradebooks, textbooks, or articles
Other Strategies for
Content Area Reading
 After Reading
 It Says, I Say, and So—Teacher poses three or
four questions that require students to draw
inferences rather than just find information in
the text.

It Says—summarizing text

I Say—writing their own thinking about the
questions posed

And So—drawing a conclusion
Other Strategies for
Content Area Reading
 After Reading
 Written Conversation—Pairs of students write
short notes back and forth to each other
about a text, lecture, video, or experiment.
They trade notes/e-mails about every 2-3
minutes WITHOUT TALKING. After passing
notes/e-mails 2-3 times, allow them to discuss
aloud with their partners. Then have a
whole-class discussion.
 Think-Pair-Share
Questions?
 Contact Jeanette Barreiro (Language Arts
Digital Curriculum Developer)
 Contact Sharon Thurman (Literacy Staff
Developer) here:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
 Reading strategies:
http://www.slideshare.net/runkled/contentarea-reading-strategies
FROM TEACHING THAT MAKES SENSE
http://www.ttms.org/content_area_reading
/content_area_reading.htm
Info on writing in reference chart
form: http://www.ttms.org/PDFs/15%20Orga
nizers%20v001%20(Full).pdf
PRINT RESOURCES
 Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to
Content-Area Reading by Harvey Daniels
and Steven Zemelman
 Teaching the Best Practice Way: Methods
that Matter K-12 by Harvey Daniels and
Marilyn Bizar
 When Kids Can’t Read What Teachers Can
Do by Kylene Beers