ACTIVATE: 
Interpreting and Analyzing Nonlinguistic Representations

Choose a nonlinguistic representation that connects to the overall main ideas in the text that students will be reading (e.g., image, video, physical object). The more senses that the nonlinguistic representation can appeal to, the better. 

Select a means for sharing the nonlinguistic representation with students (e.g., projector or document camera, multiple physical versions, digital versions). 

Preview Educator Resource: Costa’s Levels of Inquiry to determine the level of inquiry that students will access in the lesson and develop questions to use during the lesson.

Examine Student Resource: Practicing Inquiry With Nonlinguistic Texts and determine a couple of sentence stems that could be used during a ThinkAloud or while modeling the process for students.

ASK STUDENTS QUESTIONS ABOUT NONLINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION:  Ask students about the nonlinguistic representation using questions from Educator Resource: Costa’s Levels of Inquiry, such as:

• • • What do you see?

    • What do you think about when you see this?

    • How would you describe what you see to others?

    • What is happening? How do you know?

    • How does this connect to your own experiences?

    • What would change if ____________?

    • Imagine this _____________ was something that you created. Why would you have created it?

REFLECT ON RESPONSES:  Have students reflect on their responses to your questions before making predictions about how the nonlinguistic representation might connect to the text that they are about to read.

SHARE PREDICTIONS WITH PARTNERS:  Students can share their predictions with partners, in small groups, or with the whole class using Student Resource: Practicing Inquiry With Nonlinguistic Texts for support with academic language.

Give students a theme and have them select photos or other nonlinguistic representations to share with the class.

Allow students to work in groups to come up with predictions about the content of the text.

After sharing the text’s title, have students search for a nonlinguistic representation that could be used to pique interest in the text. 

For each new text, give a small group of students the task of selecting nonlinguistic representations to share with the class to introduce the new text.