The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.

Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.

Question stems and prompts you can use to draw out the historical thinker in all your students
To make reasoned and insightful inferences:
• This clearly shows that …
• From X (a detail) we can infer that …
• X (a detail) suggests that …
• It doesn’t say so, but … is probably the case, because X (a detail) …

Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read and justify their choice using examples from the text.

A variety of student activities and teacher resources for using the concept of 'making connections' as a reading strategy.

Includes resources on:
-Using Guided Reading Strategies to Improve Students’ Critical Thinking
- Apresentation on guided reading. It breaks down the process, grouping students and provides a sample lesson plan.

Materials and strategies to assist with the instructional approach of working with a small group of students who demonstrate similar reading behaviours.

This graphic organizer outlines the difference between a summary and a paraphrase. It also outlines the steps in writing a summary. A short selection is included for practice. This is a good resource for any subject area.

Start the presses! Catchy titles, eye-popping graphics, and attractive fonts are all on studentsŐ agendas in this lesson as they create magazine covers to summarize a topic.

Literary Graffiti, a high school version of the Doodle Splash student interactive, also aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers.

Includes organizers to: interpret, examine themes, make inferences, summarize and analyze.
Grades 5 to 8.

Students create mental images while reading using a three-pronged approach: developing schemata and visual awareness; Watch-Read-Watch-Read (W-R-W-R), using video clips; and a strategy similar to the think-aloud approach.

What is My Questions Round Robin?
This strategy helps students develop their thinking processes while providing students with a sense of control and a higher sense of their academic ability. This is a small group activity.

Why use it?
To provide students with the opportunity to ask personally meaningful questions of content.
To provide students with the opportunity to develop skills related to asking divergent or open-ended questions.
To provide students with the opportunity to hear the perspectives of others on a common topic.
To provide students with the opportunity to practice the skills of communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.
To activate students’ prior knowledge on a topic to be discussed in class.

Use our Summarize tool to create a summary of any given text.
Why read 10 pages to figure out what the author wanted to say?

This website is meant to be a collection of useful scripts and widgets that anyone can use (and eventually also add on their website). Because we appreciate free software, we will keep all our tools free of charge and some even open source.

What is a Question Creation Chart (QC2)?
The Question Creation Chart (also known as a Q-Chart or Q-Matrix) provides students with a framework for developing a range of personally meaningful questions, encompassing both close-ended factual questions and open-ended, divergent questions. (Adapted from Weiderhold, 1997).

Why use it?
To provide students with a framework for creating their own divergent and convergent questions on a specific topic.
To encourage students to think deeply about a topic.
To help students strengthen their understanding and comprehension of a topic.
To stimulate students’ prior knowledge about a topic.
To collect information about students’ knowledge and understanding of a topic.