Tea Party
The Tea Party strategy is a pre-reading strategy that gives kids a chance to mingle while they use skills such as making
inferences, seeing causal relationships, comparing and contrasting, sequencing, and drawing on their prior knowledge in
order to speculate what a reading might be about. This strategy can be used with a variety of texts, and is a great way
to get students to get excited about reading a selection.
How does it look in the classroom?
1.
Once you have selected a reading for students, identify phrases, statements, or words from the reading that give
insight into the theme, message, conflict, event, or characters of the reading. You might want to select some
phrases, statements, or words that can be interpreted in more than one way. You’ll want to select half as many
phrases, statements, or words as you have students. For example, if you have 30 students, you’ll want to select a
total of 15 phrases, statements, or words. Write each phrase, statement, or word on a separate index card.
Because you use half as many phrases, statements, or words as you have student, there will be some index cards
with duplicate information. Do not paraphrase, or change the wording of anything you pull from the reading,
although if you want to shorten a phrase, you can choose to omit some words.
2.
Pass out one index card to each student. Explain to students there are four goals of this activity: 1) they must share
the information on their card with as many classmates as possible; 2) they must carefully listen to the information
other students share with them from their cards; 3) they will discuss how the information on the cards might be
related; and 4) speculate what the information on the cards, taken as a whole, suggest about the reading they will
be doing.
3.
Allow students time to share their cards with each other. Explain to students, while they are sharing their
information, they need to consider two questions before they move onto sharing with another student. The
questions are:
 How might this information be related?
 What might this information suggest about the reading we will be doing?
How much time you give for this portion of the activity is up to you, based on how much time you have and how
well students are engaging in conversation regarding the information on the index cards. Students will not have
time to share with every classmate. Remember, some index cards have duplicate information.
4.
Once you think students have had enough time to share with each other, ask them to form small groups with
people who have different information on their index cards. It’s okay if some students have the same index card in
a group. Once students are in their groups, ask them to do the following:
 Discus what you presume is happening in the reading or what you think the reading is about.
 Write a “We think” statement. “We think this reading is about…” (if using informational text, you can
also ask students to group the information into categories such as causes of war, effects of war, etc.)
 Ask each group to share their “We think” statement, making sure to ask them how they arrived at
their prediction.
5.
Students read the selection. After students complete the reading, you can do a variety of things to connect back to
this activity. For example, students can discuss the accuracy of their predictions; they can compare the actual
sequence of the phrases, statements, or words as they occurred in the text (which you’ll need to prepare on a
document) with the prediction they made, then discuss which of those phrases, statements, or words might have
led them astray, and discuss why. You can ask students which other phrases, statements, or words could have been
used from the reading that might have led them to predict something more or less accurately about the text.
Note: You can choose to color code the index cards and ask students with the same color cards to discuss what the
phrases, statements, or words mean before having them share with classmates who have different information on their
cards. Be sure to check in with student to make sure they have an accurate understanding of the ocabulary on their
cards. This will insure students have clear meaning and understanding of the information for themselves and when
they participate in discussions.
Influenced by and adapted from the work of Kylene Beers, “When Kids Can’t Read”.