Reading Salad Literacy Activity

Reading salad is one of my favourite activities to get students interacting with the text and making comments on it.  I found this activity in Comprehension Connections:  Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor (see the picture of the text below).  Reading salad involves creating red and green strips of paper with the words "thinking" and "text" on them.  (The picture below is from another teacher's blog, as I never remember to take pictures of stuff!)

Each of the students and the teacher get a few text cards and twice as many thinking cards.  As we read through the chosen text, students add text cards to a big salad bowl in the middle of the reading group.  When students make a comment about the text, they can add a thinking card to the reading salad.   After reading a selection take the time to point out to your students that reading is mostly thinking, and there are many different thoughts about the same text.

If you have students who aren't sure how to comment on text, you can give them sentence starters that they can use to help them get their thoughts out.  The stem starters I've posted are from Kylene Beers, When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do:  A Guide for Teachers 6-12.  You can click on the picture of When Kids Can't Read below to see, "Stem Starters for Say Something," one of the lists that I use for this activity.