I Compared Characters, Yet Stayed At “Remember” I set up an Analyze question, but never actually asked it! All of these questions are at the "remember" level.
Beyond “Describe How This Changed Over Time” I want to go beyond just listing how a character changed. Let's get students thinking about that change!
Creating Better Research Questions Once students have a topic they'd like to research, how do we help them form more interesting questions?
What Influences A Character’s Traits? To add depth to character analysis, let's look beyond a character's traits and dig into what influenced them to have those traits.
Picture Books and Stories for Introducing Depth and Complexity Three picture books that I've used (or would use) to introduce Depth and Complexity to students of any age.
Puzzle: Words Within Words In need of some nice word puzzles that will keep your students busy? Ask them to find as many words as they can within another word. For example: can you find 10 words made from the letters in "soldier"? How about 20? 50?
Garden Path Sentences Garden Path Sentences seem to begin one way, but quickly fall apart, forcing the reader to start over and interpret words in a new way. A simple example is: "The old man the boat."
Classic Halloween Stories With Halloween approaching, it's a great time to expose students to some spooky classics. Lucky for us, many of these stories are in the public domain and freely available in many formats.
Think Like A Philosopher Up near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is “evaluating.” A great use of this level of thinking is to evaluate a character’s ethical choice. But we can go deeper! Let’s ask students to evaluate characters’ actions based on another character’s point of view. To add another layer, we’ll teach kids about philosophers and use their points of view as well.
Using Art to Practice Reading When you're teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?
