Predicting actively engages students and connects them to what they read
Predicting involves thinking ahead while reading and anticipating information and events in the text. After making predictions, students can read through the text and refine, revise, and verify their predictions. This resource guides you through suggestions to help students learn how to be successful in their predictions.
Taking Predicting to the Next Level
As students become proficient in making predictions, they can start using the Direct Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) strategy, which guides students in making predictions about a text and then reading to confirm or refute their predictions. Students justify their predictions, discuss or write their explanations, and make new predictions based specific evidence from the text. Students can also determine whether predictions came from their own prior knowledge and which predictions were based on evidence from the text.
When Can You Use It?
Reading/English
Use the prediction strategy when introducing new picture books to primary students or new chapter books to older students. With young students, read the book aloud making predictions as a class or a group and reading to confirm the predictions. With chapter books, have students make predictions at the start of each chapter so that their predictions draw from the chapters they have already read. Have students make predictions based on other books they have read by the same author or other books they have read in the same genre. After reading, discuss the text and any information that helped verify or caused them to revise their predictions.
Writing
After students read a text or passage using the prediction strategy, have them write a summary of their initial prediction and why it was correct or needed to be modified. Students can justify their ideas based on evidence from the text.
Another activity to use when teaching predicting is to have students write the first part of a story and then trade stories with a partner and continue that partner's story, anticipating future events and the story's resolution.
Lesson Plans
Predicting, The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear
This lesson is designed to introduce predicting as a reading strategy to primary students using the book The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood. In this lesson, students make and refine predictions. This lesson is the first of a set of predicting lessons designed for students in primary grades.
Predicting, Strega Nona
This lesson is designed to establish predicting as a strategy for primary students and uses the book Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola. Students will make predictions prior to reading and refine predictions while reading to help them more easily understand new concepts. This lesson is the second of a set of predicting lessons designed for students in primary grades.
Predicting, DR-TA, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi
This lesson is designed to expand students' predicting skills using the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) strategy. Predicting prior to reading and refining predictions while reading can help students more easily understand new and unfamiliar concepts. Revisiting text to verify and clarify predictions increases comprehension of the reading material.
