Sticky Notes

One easy activity to encourage students to make inferences or just to note their thinking is to use sticky notes.

There are lots of different ways to have students use sticky notes as they read.

Here's one:

1.  Give students very small sticky notes before they read.

2.  If you are studying a specific concept (like greed, ambition, lust for power, foils, metaphors, causes of a specific event, characteristics of some concept, etc.), ask students to write some code words, pictures, labels, etc. on the sticky notes to represent the concepts.

3.  Then, as they read, the students use the sticky notes to post in the text when they note an example of the concept or whatever you want them to notice and think about as they read.

This concept can also be used for students to note places where they agree with the author (a check on the note), where they disagree (a minus), when they don't get it (a question mark), etc. The class can decide on the symbols.

As a warm-up for the following day, students can share with a partner some of their "comments."