AFTER READING ACTIVITIES Purpose: These activities assume the children know the text and have no comprehension

difficulties and uses the text as a springboard and may fulfil any of these three purposes 1. Use the familiar text as basis for language study 2. Allow students to respond creatively to what they have read. 3. Focus students more deeply on the information of the text Questioning- What do you think the author is trying to teach us, what did you like and dislike about the story, one question I would like to ask the author is, the information is valuable because, I would like to know more about, what was interesting about the book, what information would you like to tell other people about? Story map- As a group draw the story, on a wall chart, sequence the main actions and record with illustrations. Retell the story- children use the pictures to retell the story (Gives information about their understanding of the story). Innovate on the text- change the story, but keep the same story line e.g. different characters, main events. Innovate the beginning or ending Write a new beginning or ending, in groups or as a whole class. Jumbled text/sentence exercises Cut up paragraph into sentence strips and mix them up, reorder into paragraph, cut up sentences into words and mix them up, reorder into sentences. Ask children true/false questions OR fact/ opinion statements related to the text, Ask the children to make up their own statements, true/false. Cloze activities in groups or pairs, children can justify why they have chosen their answer Traditional every 7th word, syntactic- structure words, semantic- content words oral cloze children fill in the missing words, while they read along with the teacher Learning to Learn in a Second Language Pauline Gibbons Monster cloze This consists of only the title, and gaps. Students guess words which are written in and as more words are added it becomes easier to complete the cloze. Vanishing cloze Choose a part of the text, or a summary. Write it all on the board, read together, then rub out one word, reread, putting in the missing word, then erase another word and repeat the process. Continue until all the words are removed and the students are Reading from memory. Cartoon strip In groups or individually, turn the story into a cartoon strip, using the dialogue as words in speech bubbles. Readers theatre Children each have a copy of the book, and choose a child for each characters dialogue, while other children read narration. Practise the reading for the performance. Children could script their own based on the story. Wanted posters Design a wanted poster for a character in the book, incorporating as much as the information from the story as possible. Timelines Texts that incorporate passage of time lend themselves to a timeline.. Children can illustrate time lines. Hot seat Children sit in a circle and one child is chosen as a character from the book. Other students ask questions to find out more about the characters life. Should be consistent with the story. Move back, or forwards in time Its seventy years ago and the old woman is now only a child.... and continue to ask questions of the person in the hot seat. This gives children lots of ideas for stories of their own. Freeze frames Drama activities that show a tableaux of key stages of the story. The audience close their eyes and the group prepares the tableaux, using their bodies and simple props, after 10 seconds, the audience close their eyes again and the group arrange for the next tableaux and so on until the story is told. The group needs to decide the main events, and then how they will be shown, and then how to move quickly from one to the next. No talking is required. Preparation of the tableaux allows discussion of the main elements characters and events of the story Text reconstruction Cut an excerpt of text into paragraphs or sentences, students to put into order and explain their answer Consonant groups Sort objects, or pictures of objects into groups using the beginning sound (Pencil, pen, paper, box, ball, lid, leaf). Phonic families Build word lists using words in the book, that contain the same sounds, spelt the same way

Picture sentence matching Take about 6 pictures and 6 matching sentences, children to match up. Questioning the text Focus on the pictures and on the characters; ask questions that show children that what is in the book is not necessarily the whole truth. Discuss what the characters are like Make lists of words or ideas that are associated with key people in the text Rewrite a well known tale, changing the characteristics of characters Talk about stereotyping Book discussion groups Summarising and paraphrasing the text Oral summaries, in groups students read, and collectively summarise Students to write a summary, limit the number of sentences. Suggest a title for each paragraph Write 2 or 3 sentences under each paragraph heading With narrative, ask children to retell shorter and shorter, until as short as possible, write on the board and discuss Explain key points in less than 1 minute Groups work together to compose a sentence that summarises the text Venn Diagrams Use two or more overlapping circles to compare topics, characters, plots, or facts Sensory chart Allows children to see, feel and hear characters, settings or events. Children read text, or passage and add information about what it might look like, sound like or feel like Retrieval chart This is a chart to record information about a number of categories or topics to allow comparisons. Whats your story? Teaches students about the structure of a text. Give students a recording sheet with headings linked to the text e.g. setting, characters, events, text type and theme. After several of these activities, students can compare texts. Reporter Write a newspaper article or headline for a problem or event in the story. Designer Design a different cover for the book. Outrageous objects Write a set of instructions for how to use an object in the book. Postman Write a postcard or letter from the point of view of one character in the book to another. Travel Guide Design a travel brochure for a place from the book. Famous five key word search Reading Resource Book, First Steps Very Important points Reading Resource Book, First Steps Main idea pyramid Reading Resource Book, First Steps

2|RCHK Reading Workshop : Participants Workbook