Butcher the Reading

Butcher the Reading

About: 

• • Students read an article or excerpt from a book/text and generate questions or discussion topics from the reading.  

Objective:

• • Students use close reading techniques to extract information from reading and generate questions that lead to more in-depth knowledge about a topic.

This works well for:

• • • All grade levels 7-12

    • Close Reading: Students must extract information from the text. 

    • Summarizing: Students must summarize article. 

    • Metacognition: Students identify road blocks in reading. 

This does not work well for: 

• • • Students who don't work well independently. 

Materials:

• • Article/excerpt of interest

  • Large role of butcher paper, news print, etc

  • Optional: Sentence starters

Preparation:

• • Print article/excerpt

  • Cut large piece of paper ahead of time. 

Directions

• • Break students into groups of 3-4.

  • Each student claims a portion of the poster paper that is set in the middle of all group members.

  • Each student reads the article/excerpt.

  • As the student reads, they jot down questions about the text, words they don't know, extension questions for further research, etc 

  • Students share with their group and have small group discussions

  • Large group discussions

Variations of this task:

• • Students must write a "golden line" from the reading so they have at least ONE thing written. 

  • Use metacognitive reading response sentence starters (see below)

Resources for Articles

• • Science News for Kids

  • Science News (use with higher level readers or older students)

  • Scientific American

  • Science Magazine