Diversify

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.

This strategy gives students tools to use when exploring, thinking about and discussing read-aloud texts.

Children will learn about the key components of paper and online text structure. Students will also gain the terminology necessary to talk about the structure and parts of a text.

This strategy exposes students to literature that places out-group identities at the center of the curriculum.

Agree/disagree statements challenge students to think critically about their knowledge of a topic, theme or text. The strategy exposes students to the major ideas in a text before reading—engaging their thinking and motivating them to learn more. It also requires them to reconsider their original thinking after reading the text and to use textual evidence to support and explain their thinking.

Generating Interactions between Schemata and Texts (GIST) is a summarization procedure that helps students digest complex texts by requiring contextual word learning. GIST explicitly combines the most important words with reading and writing to comprehend complex texts.

In shared reading, learners observe experts reading with fluency and expression while following along or otherwise engaging with the text. This strategy should focus on a specific instructional element (or mini-lesson) that improves targeted reading comprehension skills and promotes Common Core readiness.