2 Fill in missing words

Another simple active reading strategy is ‘Fill in the missing words’. It uses the simple idea of removing some words from a section of text. Your students’ task is to copy out the text correctly predicting and then inserting the missing words. Students usually really like doing this activity. Activity 2 allows you to put yourself in the place of one of a student who is studying inheritance. This way you will be able to see what doing the activity feels like for you.

Activity 2: Fill in the missing words on ‘Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance’

This activity is for you do to on your own.

  • Read the text on ‘Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance’ below.
  • You will notice that there are some words missing.
  • Copy out the text, but insert a word into each gap to make complete sentences.

… was a Czech monk who carried out controlled breeding experiments with mice and pea plants to find out about …. He published his ideas on inheritance in … but they were not very well received because … of the time were not really interested in the mathematical treatment of scientific results, or keen on the idea that there was a ‘… unit’. It was not until … that Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance were accepted by ….

Mendel’s Laws are:

  1. That a heritable unit called a … is passed on from one generation to the next.
  2. That genes can exist in different forms that are called alleles.
  3. That each individual must have two alleles per feature.
  4. That the sex cells can only have one … per feature.
  5. One allele can be … over the other.

Pause for thought

  • Have you tried something like this before? If so, how did it go?
  • How do you think your students will respond to this technique? Where could you use it in your teaching next week?

You can check that you have correctly filled in the missing blanks by looking at the answer which is given as Resource 1.

Activity 2 uses modified text that must be prepared in advance. The level of difficulty of the activity can be changed quite easily – for example, by:

  • increasing or reducing the number of missing words
  • increasing or decreasing the amount of text
  • supplying all, some or none of the missing words
  • supplying the first or last letter of the missing words.

Perhaps you can think of some more ways to modify the activity. One important point to note is that if a ‘Fillin the missing words’ activity is not well thought out and checked in advance to make sure that it works, it can go wrong when you use it the classroom.

1 Underline key words

3 Complete the diagram