Pre-Reading Strategies That Motivate

Teachers frequently ask for ways to motivate kids to want to read. After all, it’s pretty hard to work on students’ reading comprehension if they didn’t do the reading. With that said, here are two of my favorite pre-reading strategies to motivate kids to dive into the passage.

Prop Prediction

Reveal four or five objects (or pictures of objects) that relate to the plot or information in the day’s reading. With these props spread out in front of them, the students write (or voice) individual predictions as to how they believe these items might appear or interact within the story or text. After the predictions are written and some are shared, then read the passage to determine whose predictions were most accurate.

Extension Activity

Students tend to get so “into” this strategy that they like to take turns reading ahead, coming up with their own props, and bringing them in for the next day’s prop prediction. Just think, a week earlier you couldn’t get them to do the reading and now they want to read ahead! AMAZING!

Story Impressions Activity

List six words pulled directly from the assigned passage. Jot them on the board in the order they will appear in the text. Before reading, have students use all six words to write a couple of sentences. They are predicting how they think the words will be referenced in the story. For example, if the day’s reading was Edgar Allen Poe’s "Tell-Tale Heart," the words listed on the board might be: buried, floor, police, heartbeat, guilt, crazy, confession.

This process engages students before they read and then sets a purpose for them while reading — to see how close their sentences are to the actual text. NOTE: Although this is a narrative example, this strategy works just as well with informational text, too.