Reading activities are vital for academic performance, but also for all other aspects of life. By the time they’re in high school, students should have already mastered their reading skills, which allows them to work on efficiency, speed, and improving reading comprehension for complex technical subjects. This is where reading activities for high school students come into play.
High school students are teenagers with a rebellious spirit and sometimes a disinterested attitude toward school and reading in general, as their social life is becoming more important. Nonetheless, high school is also a time when students need to think about their future and make life-altering decisions regarding their future career path.
You can understand how, in a situation like the one described above, reading comprehension and good reading habits are essential for students’ future. But, how do you engage students in potentially intense reading materials without disengaging them? With reading activities and strategies that will make reading a fun and meaningful experience, of course!
In this article, we’ll focus on 17 effective reading activities for high school that you can introduce in three phases: pre-, during, and post-reading. Each cluster of reading activities has its specific purpose and benefits. Best of all, we made sure the activities are based on general principles and flexibility, meaning you can use them regardless of whether you’re teaching English Literature, Science, or any other subject.
Pre-Reading Activities for High School Students
The first cluster of reading activities is called pre-reading activities because they precede the reading assignment. Their aim is to facilitate reading and improve comprehension by preparing the student for the topic. To illustrate this, think of a paper on the causes of the Revolutionary War. In fact, this is a good example that we’re going to stick with throughout this article in order to visualize the nature of the reading activities.
So, the students need to read a paper about the Revolutionary War. What might facilitate or otherwise impair the reading comprehension, speed, or learning process for this assignment?
Three Pillars for Good Reading Skill in Academic Context
Reading comprehension will primarily depend on previous knowledge, general vocabulary, and the familiarity of specific terminology (not counting individual differences between students). Speed and efficacy will depend on the reading strategies and it mainly affects the students’ reading motivation and attitude. The learning process, on the other hand, depends on many different things, but knowing what to pay attention to, how to organize the content, and sharing impressions with others helps immensely.
These three elements roughly define the outcome of all reading activities in one way or another. Therefore, we should keep them in mind when deciding when a reading activity helps the students. For instance, reading comprehension is tightly associated with precious knowledge, vocabulary, and familiarity with the topic which is what pre-reading activities target. On the other hand, the speed and efficacy of reading depend more on the reading strategies implemented during reading. Now, if you think post-reading activities help the learning process the most, you’re right, but learning is also very dependent on the pre-reading activities, and the student’s motivation.
Let’s start with the pre-reading activities!
Pre-Reading Activities
Word Association
Word association is a powerful technique that’s mostly implemented in the classroom when children are still learning how to read. However, word associations are also very useful when students are required to read a text on a complex topic or a new subject. With this technique, children will activate the right vocabulary needed for processing the text.
How to use word association? There are two ways. First, you can use abstract words for which children need to find words with similar meanings or instances where the same words would have a different meaning. Another way is for kids to match words with definitions or practical applications of that word without changing the meaning.
Just make sure that all the words used in the word-association task complement the reading material and activate the students’ vocabulary that will help them effectively read the text.
Discussions
The second pre-reading activity is an open discussion before the students read the material. We know that discussions are essential as a post-reading activity, but they’re also incredibly helpful before reading. How? Well, they prime students for the reading material by offering some information about the topic and forming expectations on what the material is supposed to address.
It’s not the same when you read without knowing or expecting anything, and reading while thinking: “Oh, they explained how the Revolutionary War began, but they didn’t mention anything about the causes. I wonder if they will talk about this further in the text because in the discussion, Brian mentioned the Sons of Liberty. They sound so cool, and I wonder what was their influence.”
Students will have an opportunity to hear different opinions, for example, what other classmates know about the topic, which naturally stimulates their curiosity and brings the topic on a more concrete and understandable level.
Text Survey
Text Survey is another powerful pre-reading activity for high school students because it teaches them how to identify the value of the text before reading it. In other words, during their university studies, students will be expected to do independent work, read tons of academic articles, and most importantly, filter out relevant information. This is why teaching them how to do text surveys, before investing a lot of time to read the full text, is essential for high school students.
First, let us just say that a text survey is not the same as skimming – a common misconception. The latter is a strategic, selective reading method for highlighting the most important information from the text (we’ll explain it in the next section). Text surveying, on the other hand, is a pre-reading activity that allows students to determine if the text is something they actually want to read.
Of course, when you assign students a particular text, they don’t need to survey it because they have to read it. But, since surveying is an essential academic reading skill, you can create opportunities where it would be beneficial for students to survey the text.
How to do this? Again, we’ll use our Revolutionary War example. Let’s say students need to prepare a presentation on this topic. Share with them ten papers that approach this topic from different angles or discuss different causes, effects, or consequences, and so on. Assign each student a specific task – what their presentation should be about, and ask them to base it on the information from the papers.
Now, some of the papers won’t even deal with the subtopics some of the students need to take. This is why, unless they want to read all the 10 or 15 papers, they’ll need to survey them to find which one is the best fit for their assignment.
Surveying involves looking at the authors, headline, abstract and keywords (if available), the chapter titles, subheadings, date, etc. Basically, all the information that stands out and was used to outline the text. It’s an extremely beneficial technique because it takes only 5-10 minutes and saves a lot of time.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming can be done within the discussion or as a separate pre-reading activity. Just like word association, it helps students to activate their previous knowledge on the topic, make them think, and form hypotheses about the text’s scope and purpose.
Within the classroom, you can organize brainstorming sessions in different ways, but here’s one example.
Show students the book cover or the headline of a paper they need to read and ask them the following questions:
- What comes to mind when you see this cover/headline? (write down the words)
- What do you think this text/book is about?
- Why do you think the text/book is about xx (make them associate the topic with the course itself)?
- In one word, what do you think it’s the main underlying message of this text/book?
- In one word, why do you think I chose this for us to read?
Speed Chatting
We’re all familiar with the concept of speed dating, and I assume high school students are too, which is what makes this pre-reading activity even more fun. Speed chatting is based on the concept of speed dating, only in speed chatting the purpose is to find as much as you can about the topic, instead of the person.
How to organize speed chatting? Introduce a topic, let’s say the Revolutionary War. Then, before they need to read a book or a text on that topic, ask them to go on speed chatting with each and every one of their classmates, sharing their previous knowledge about that topic. Usually, students should sit in pairs, one against another, and speak about the topic for one minute before moving on and speaking with another classmate.
As you may assume, the benefit of speed chatting is that it maximizes the students’ previous knowledge before they read a topic. In other words, if one student knows a lot about the topic, that will be shared among everyone like gossip.
Introducing Vocabulary
A more formal pre-reading activity involves you sharing a glossary with important, new, or difficult words that students will encounter in the book or in the assigned text. However, make sure you all engage and discuss the glossary in the classroom and out loud, instead of expecting the students to go over it alone. For instance, each student can read a word in front of everyone and make a sentence in which they apply the word. This is because some students might be too shy to say that they don’t understand some of the words.
Video Introduction
Watching movies, TEDtalks, video tutorials or animated visual presentations is not reading, but it’s a great way to prepare students for reading a text on a specific topic. In our example about the Revolutionary War, seeing a short movie, an animation with a timeline, the landscape, or simply how people re-enact the war, will put visual images in their heads while reading the text later, which helps to remember and understand the content in a faster and easier manner.
Questions
In many of the above-mentioned examples, we’ve seen that questions are a great way to make students think, activate their previous knowledge, or get them talking about the topic. However, thinking about questions as a pre-reading activity is a little different.
According to Tudor (1989), there are five categories of content-related pre-reading activities, including pre-questions that the text should answer and questions that activate previous knowledge. In fact, the author also included content organizers, vocabulary activities, and predictions. It’s interesting that he found predictions and questions that activate the students’ previous knowledge are a lot more effective for reading comprehension than vocabulary exercises. It’s proposed that this phenomenon is due to the ability of students to use contextual cues and overcome vocabulary deficits thanks to background knowledge.
Reflective or summary questions formulated as “What we’ve learned in this activity?” or “Based on everything, what can we expect to learn from the text/book?” are good examples of questions that activate background knowledge and work perfectly when implemented after speed chatting, brainstorming, or discussions.
The answers to these questions should be in the form of predictions that students expect to be fulfilled by reading the assigned literature.
Strategic Reading Activities
Strategic reading activities for high school are activities that students can implement while reading the text, regardless of the topic of the material. They help them to better organize the material, give them a sense of structure, improve reading comprehension, but also increase the speed and efficacy of reading, which in turn prevents students from becoming disengaged when they come across long reading materials.
- Skimming – the first strategy involves quickly skimming the material before students engage with it on a more in-depth level. However, it’s not and should not be a replacement for reading (which is why we classified it as a separate reading activity). Skimming is the process of skipping details, data, graphs, or other elaboration for the purpose of getting the main (big picture) idea or argument behind the text and preventing one to lose oneself within the details. After skimming, the students should read the text again, this time paying attention to all the details.
- BEP – Beginning and End-Paragraph – the BEP is an awesome reading habit after just reading an academic text. The reason for this is that more often than not, academic literature is long and complex, which might make some students overwhelmed – not knowing what was the purpose of the text and its conclusions. Therefore, quickly going through the introduction and the end-paragraph again gives a nice overview and refreshes students’ memory.
- Key Fragments – ask students to always think about the most important pieces of information (according to them) that the text introduces. Then, they can highlight this information and use it later, without having to go over the whole text again. Also, when studying, these key fragments should be enough for the student to connect all the other information around them.
Post-Reading Activities for High School Students
Finally, we got to the last cluster of reading activities that help students consolidate knowledge and improve the learning process after reading the material. When thinking about post-reading activities for high school, ask yourself “What could students do to engage with the material after reading it?” Basically, post-reading activities should require students to use what they’ve read in one form or another.
In addition, we propose six different activities which you can organize after the students finish reading the material.
Outlining
The first, and probably the simplest post-reading activity is to ask students to outline the text based on specific requirements, depending on the topic and subject. For example, if the students are reading a book or a text about the Revolutionary War, ask them to outline the material based on the timeline on which events occurred, or the causes, effects, and consequences discussed. When talking about a topic, there’s more than one way in which you can organize the content. Therefore, you can ask students to outline the material the way they think it’s most informative, or as previously discussed in the example, give them specific instructions.
Graphic Organizing
Very similar to outlining, graphic organization of the material is basically a visual representation of the outline of the text. You can ask kids to prepare a graphic organization of the text after their usual outline. What do they need to include?
First, they can customize it any way they want to. The two important things which every graphic organization should have are “nodes” where a message or a word or a symbol is drawn and “connections” between the elements of the graph. The connections are usually presented with lines and other variations representing different things. For example, a sequence of arrows pointed only in one direction might indicate a timeline between the “nodes.” However, they can also be color-coded or pattern-coded, representing different relations.
The value of this activity is that it engages kids to once again think of the structure and connections between different elements of the text, which is very helpful for consolidating knowledge and indicates that the text was fully comprehended.
Summary Writing
A more classic post-reading activity in high schools is writing a summary of the text or book that students have just read. This is sometimes a graded assignment with specific instruction or topic, but it’s maybe even more helpful if it becomes a habit. Summaries don’t have to be long or detailed and the main idea is for students to work on their skills of extracting valuable information from a piece of text. That is, from the summary you can evaluate how much the students have understood the material and what kinds of information they focused on.
Then, you can give them feedback. Again, following the example of the Revolutionary War, some students might be focusing too much on the dates without mentioning the causes or the reasons, others might only talk about the causes and use narration (writing it like a story), without remembering any year, and so on.
Character/Topic Analysis
As the texts become more and more complex, students might start to struggle to keep up. For instance, their comprehension might be good, meaning they understand the texts, but can they meaningfully analyze the text or even attempt to critique it with well-formed counter-arguments? This is what you need to find out to make sure they’re hitting the learning objectives set for the year.
To help them out, give them frequent readings and after that share a template for them to use in order to analyze the topic/character/event. Here’s an example of one type of template for analysis:
- Graph 1: What’s the argument/strategy/style/feature used?
- Graph 2: Textual evidence – Where can we find that in the text?
- Graph 3: What’s the purpose for using that argument/strategy/style/feature (what is the author trying to tell us)?
- Graph 4: How does this argument or strategy support the claim?
- Graph 5: What’s the effect?
Presentation
We’ve mentioned presentations a couple of times before, and that’s because they’re a great way for kids to present the text they’ve been reading. In presentations, students have visual freedom (adding graphics, animations, images, symbols, drawings, etc), as well as writing freedom (they present orally, which means the writing serves only them).
Other students may ask questions or comment which is a really great way for everyone to see how others understood the text.
Discussion
Finally, the last reading activity for high school students is, again, discussion, but this time as a post-reading activity. How is it different? Well, during the discussion after reading the text, students should share their general impressions. Here are a couple of questions usually answered during the final discussion.
- Were your expectations met?
- What was surprising or unexpected?
- What was learned?
- What questions were raised while reading?
- Where can we go from here?
- Do you need a follow-up reading for better comprehension?
- Do you want to elaborate your knowledge on a specific aspect of the topic?
- What got your interest the most?
Before You Go
As we’ve seen, there are many different reading activities for high school students that can promote reading comprehension, motivation, speed, and efficacy of reading, as well as the learning process itself. Hopefully, we did a good job organizing this article and you’re satisfied with the way we classified the reading activities. We believe that this way, you can make clear connections with the benefits obtained with each of the activities and their overall purpose.
Of course, you don’t have to implement all of the activities, that would be way too overwhelming which defeats the purpose because it will eventually make reading an undesired activity. Instead, pick the ones you think will best work for your students or try different ones and see what the students’ feedback is.
Finally, if you need any help on any of the reading topics, don’t forget to head over to our website and pick out a worksheet! They’ll engage the students, teach them something more about the topic, and save you a lot of time! Also, make it a habit to regularly check our blog, as we share new informational guides, such as this one, every week!
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