MAKE A SIMPLE SALAD
Effective teaching reading strategies can include kinesthetic learning modalities. Try making this simple salad!
In French cuisine, a simple salad is made of only lettuce and onion. Your students will make a simple salad while learning what it means to think about thinking/reading (metacognition).
Tear up pieces of green and white paper. The green paper is the lettuce, and the white is the onion.
Ask the students what they should have more of in their salad, lettuce or onion? Of course, the answer is lettuce.
Tell them the lettuce represents your thinking about what you are reading. The onion is when you are just reading the words of a text.
Call two students up to stand with you while you read aloud. Tell them that whenever you are just reading the text, one of them is to put some onion into a bowl. When you stop and think aloud about what you have read, the other student must put in some lettuce. This takes some practice, so you may want to work on it ahead of time.
Here is an example using The Magic Horns: A South African Cinderella Tale:
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there were many large and small kraals on the veldt in South Africa.(white paper)
"I wonder what a kraal is. I bet it is home or a village. But what is a veldt? It must be a type of landform."(green papers)
In one of the kraals lived a mother and father and their little son/(white paper)
"Okay, a kraal is definitely a home or a village."(green paper)
One day, the mother became very ill. Her skin become the color of dust, and despite everyone's efforts, she soon died.(white paper)
"Why would the author say her skin became the color of dust? That must mean she slowly died and looked very grey or yellowish."(green papers)
The final outcome is a very visual way of showing students how good readers think about what they are reading. The salad bowl should have much more green than white in it
You could then have the students practice it with each other, and also use it at any time you are observing a student struggling with comprehending a text.