1 Underline key words
This particular strategy is a very straight forward for your students. ‘Underline key words’ involves very little preparation or resources. The main idea behind it is that students search through a piece of text to find a ‘target’. The targets can be words, sentences or phrases. Concepts or ideas can also be used as targets. You decide what the targets are for each piece of text you want to use.
Once your students have found the targets, they can either underline, circle or highlight them. If you are using the textbook, using a pencil to do this means that the marking can be rubbed out. Activity 1 shows you how to carry out an example of this simple activity in the context of codominance with your students.
Activity 1: Underlining key words on codominance
This is an activity for you to do with your students.
Introduce the topic of the activity as codominance and write the words ‘codominance’, ‘phenotype’, ‘allele’, and ‘dominant‘ on the blackboard. Then explain to your students what they are required to do.
- Work with the person sitting next to you.
- Read the information on codominance. (Use the worksheet found in Resource 1 or this section in their textbook.)
- Find and underline in pencil these key words written on the blackboard:
- codominance
- phenotype
- allele
- dominant.
Then ask students to work with the person next to them. Each person uses the text (or textbook) to work out a definition for two of the words. They should then discuss each other’s definitions. Once they have agreed they should write all four definitions into their exercise book.
Then ask some of the pairs of students to share definitions with the whole class so that you can develop a shared set of definitions with the class. Make sure everyone has an accepted set of definitions written in their book.
Finally write some questions on the blackboard that will test their understanding of the definitions. Working with a different partner, they should discuss the answers to the questions before writing their answers.
This activity demonstrates just how simple this type of active reading activity can be to plan and use with your students. Having carried out this activity, there would be many ways in which to then progress with your students. For example, you could ask them if they can give any more examples of codominance in nature.
Many active reading strategies can be done very effectively in pairs – see the key resource ‘Using pair work [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’.
Active reading strategies