By Angela Borsellino
I am a secondary English preservice teacher who is brainstorming different lesson plans and learning strategies based on my own experiences as a student and my work with youth during field placements. Reading aloud is an important practice in ELA classrooms and is often used. Typically, the teacher or students read aloud, and once the reading is finished, the class discusses the content of the related chapters or passages. I created the lesson plan that follows as a response to my personal experience with divided attention or passive listening when reading in class.
The following lesson plan is a fairly simple way to keep this classic outline of reading aloud as a class while encouraging engaged reading by integrating discussion and note taking throughout the process. Additionally, this lesson helps teachers assess what students can and can’t identify in the text while reading. This lesson helps students guide their attention, promotes notetaking, and works as peers teaching peers.
The Coloured Cues lesson plan is flexible and can be executed in many ways. It is easily adaptable for any grade or skill level the teacher needs. Furthermore, it can be adapted to cover any material or skill the teacher wants their students to familiarize themselves with.
Below, a lesson procedure will be outlined. The materials needed for this lesson plan are coloured cue cards or coloured papers cut into squares. (Four squares of different colours will be needed for each student), the novel the class is working with, and one large visual aid for students to refer to during the reading.
Example of lesson structure:
While reading any classroom novel, prepare a short list containing 3-4 themes, symbols, plot points, or literary devices you want your students to be looking out for. Associate each literary feature on your list with a coloured card.
For example, while reading the young adult novel, The Marrow Thieves by Cherri Dimaline present the following list on the board:
1.Allusion (the literary device in a fictional work that refers to a real-world historical event) → Yellow card.
2.Dreams (symbol) → Red card.
3.The relationship between humans and the natural world (theme) → Blue card.
In this case, these literary features were thoughtfully picked by the teacher to prompt rich discussion from students while reading the section planned.
Once the content of these coloured cards has been selected throughout the reading, teachers may follow these procedures:
- Divide the class by the number of listed literary features you have for that day. In this case, there would be three large groups. Have students sit next to at least 1-2 peers with the same colour card as them.
- Have each group oversee one colour specifically, even though they each have all three coloured cards with them.
- While reading, when students encounter a passage that relates to their assigned colour card they can raise their colour, take 2-3 minutes to discuss with their group members, and then get ready to explain to the class how the allusion, symbol, or theme they found was present and why it was important to the text.
The Coloured Cues activity can have several beneficial outcomes for students. Firstly, this activity gives students something to pay attention to while reading and lets them process immediately, as compared to answering questions at the end of a chapter, when they might not have been paying attention. This change promotes active reading. Secondly, each student has their own-coloured card for every literary feature listed on the board for the duration of the unit. They can use these cue cards for notetaking. Keeping their theme card throughout the novel and filling in page numbers or notes is great annotation practice and will set up the student for successful essay writing. Lastly, this activity helps teachers assess where students’ understanding lies. If they miss a literary feature completely during the reading, the teacher knows what they must review. Furthermore, if the students explain the literary feature poorly in class, the teacher learns it’s an area they still need to work on.
Overall, this activity is extremely adaptable and somewhat simple to integrate into classroom reading. It is an effective way to incorporate notetaking and to promote engagement with the text. Not only is it a good teaching tool but this strategy also works as formative assessment and helps the teacher evaluate students’ understanding and to support their success as readers.