I was really worried about my lesson this past Friday because the week seemed to be particularly long.  We just had a long break followed by a short teaching week and now I had to get the students to read and comprehend information about Native American forms of government.

One of the lesson’s objectives was for the students to be able to explain how specific Native Americans tribes influenced the U.S. Constitution.

Unfortunately, meeting this lesson’s objective came in the second half of a lesson that happened to fall out on Friday.

So…what did I do?

I knew just having the students read and answer questions would be torture for them on a Friday afternoon (not to mention that many of them would not comprehend the information anyway).

So I decided to use a reading comprehension strategy that I have had a great deal of success with as a classroom teacher.

The teaching strategy is a simple prediction strategy.  And, when I say simple I mean simple.  In fact, that is part of the beauty of this strategy…its simplicity.

All I did was quickly type up 7 statements from the reading, but changed a few of them to be false.

Next, I had students make predictions on whether or not they thought the statement was true or false.  If they thought it was true they put a “t” next to the statement and if they thought it was false they put an “f” next to the statement.

It was not until after students made their predictions (and we did a class poll on those predictions) that I gave them the reading.

Students then read (on their own) and checked whether or not their predictions were correct. They put a check mark if they were correct and an “x” if they were incorrect.

Like I said, the simplicity of this strategy is only part of it’s beauty…the other part is the fact they actually wanted to read…That’s right, on a Friday afternoon, at the end of a long week my students actually wanted to read the information on Native American forms of government.

Why?

Again, it’s simple…they wanted to read to see how many of their predictions were correct.

Bottom Line: teachers need to give their students a purpose for reading…

And, as always, this greatly reduces the chances of classroom management issues arising.

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