Critical Thinking about Traditional Stories

This strategy provides tools to create questions that help students engage critically with Perspectives central texts and examine them for issues of power and social inequity. The activities suggested here also encourage readers to bring their knowledge and experiences to the reading of a text.

Students explore the same Perspectives central text from various viewpoints and identify author, speaker point-of-view, publication date, intended audience and characters.

Using either a Perspectives central text or their original work, children take on the role of “author,” reading the text aloud and facilitating a class discussion.

Challenge the Text helps students ask and answer their own text-dependent questions by taking multiple perspectives and uncovering assumptions and biases within the text.