As a toddler, my parents would take me hiking and coax me up
mountains with candy. Preteaching is a little bit like planting M&Ms along
a mountain trail. If, while trudging through a dense text, students discover a
familiar word or sentence, they are encouraged—willing to keep trudging in
hopes of finding more hidden treats.
Preteach vocabulary using a word knowledge checklist. Identify
potentially challenging words from a reading, and ask students to identify
their familiarity with each: BFF, friend, acquaintance, or stranger. A student
may be friends with photosynthesis,
only an acquaintance with chloroplast,
and a stranger to autotroph.
After each student previews the vocab independently, have them
work with small groups to fill in each other's gaps. Then bring the whole class
together to define the words that are strangers to most students. Later,
students can bring along their new vocab friends to make reading a complex text
less daunting.
Sentence unscrambling is preteaching disguised as a game. Choose
one or two complex sentences in your reading, and break them into phrases. Mix
up the phrases, present them to students, and task them with recreating the
original sentence.
with a magnesium ion in the center.
which consists of
is a porphyrin ring,
The central part of the chemical structure
of carbon and nitrogen
of a chlorophyll molecule
several fused rings
Stumped? "The central part of the chemical structure of a
chlorophyll molecule is a porphyrin ring which consists of several fused rings
of carbon and nitrogen with a magnesium ion in the center."
Student groups working on this activity will review their
content knowledge without even realizing it. They'll also have the joy of
discovering the sentence in its natural habitat when they go on to read the
assignment.
Not quite as good as a hidden M&M, but it's close!
Source: IRA Inspire (Nov. 2013)