Reading Strategies
Over the course of 8 weeks and 16 tutoring sessions, Gabby and I worked on about 1 to 2 strategies weekly. While reading A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer, we focused on comprehansion and reading strategies, literary elements such as characters, theme, plot, etc., and the creation of a final book report project. Below are descriptions of a couple of my favorite strategies and lessons.
F.A.S.T. Characterization
F.A.S.T. is a strategy used to help students understand characters and characterization when reading. F.A.S.T. is an acronym, standing for the following steps:
-
F: Feelings
-
A: Actions
-
S: Sayings
-
T: Thoughts
By listing out each of the different aspects of a character, the student is able to get a full, well-rounded description and understanding of that character.
During this lesson, we used this strategy for the main character David, as well as for his abusive mother, and then compared the two so we could understand their relationship with one another.
Point of View Re-Write
In order to fully understand the novel, which is told from the 1st person perspective of a young boy being abused by his evil mother, we did a point of view activity. During one of the more suspensful and action-packed scenes of the book, David, the boy, is "accidentally" stabbed in the stomach by his own mother. I wanted to really dissect this scene and dig deeper than just the plot. So, I decided that we should imagine this chapter from the mother's perspective.
So, we first mapped our thoughts. We filled out a brainstorm sheet, pictured at the left, and walked through how each character felt during this moment in the plot. We used evidence from the text to support our thinking.
Then, after collecting some data from the chapter, we re-wrote the "stab scene" from the mother's point of view, as opposed to David's. We then shared our writing with each other.
This was a great way to not only better understand the plot, characters, and conflict, but also to get creative with our reading and writing.
