Know Your Classmates and Mix it Up Learning Plan

An anchor chart is an artifact of classroom learning. Like an anchor, it holds students' and teachers' thoughts, ideas and processes in place. Anchor charts can be displayed as reminders of prior learning and built upon over multiple lessons.

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.

Student journals are a collection of students’ written and illustrated predictions, reactions, understandings and questions based on Perspectives central text read alouds.

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

During Cracking the Code, students examine texts for bias related to race, gender, class, religion, age and sexual orientation, among other identity categories.

In word cheering, students sing, chant and move to the components of new words.

A word wall is an organized display of vocabulary words drawn from central texts students are reading.

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.