Readers Theater- Race and Justice

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.

Children will learn about the key components of paper and online text structure. Students will also gain the terminology necessary to talk about the structure and parts of a text.

This strategy includes text type charts and matching exercises to help students differentiate between Perspectives central text types, increasing their ability to read, comprehend and produce those forms.

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

Using either a Perspectives central text or their original work, children take on the role of “author,” reading the text aloud and facilitating a class discussion.

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

During a readers’ theater, two or more students dramatize a text by reading expressively.

During resistant reading, students analyze the dominant reading of a text and “resist” it by engaging in alternative readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.

During shared reading, learners observe experts reading with fluency and expression while following along or otherwise engaging with the text. This strategy should focus on a specific instructional element (or mini lesson) that improves targeted reading comprehension skills while promoting the joy of reading.

Think Aloud requires readers to stop during their reading to think, reflect and discuss their process. Readers talk about skipping text, rereading, searching back in the text for information, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, making connections, reflecting, predicting and visualizing.