A Pre-Reading Strategy: Tea Party by Kylene Beers

This strategy gets students to consider parts of a text before reading it. The teacher takes actual phrases from the text about to be read, and writes one on each index card to hand out to each student. Several students can have the same phrase. When students receive their cards, they walk around the classroom, share their cards, listen to others, and discuss how the cards might be connected and make inferences as to what the text might be about. After this, they get into smaller groups to discuss what they’ve learned from the cards and what they think are possibilities for setting, characters, and problems in the text. We need to remind dependent readers that comprehension begins before they read a text. It is not simply a set of comprehension questions that one completes after the reading is done. The meaning-making needs to occur even before they start the text.