Before Reading Strategies

Many times students will just go straight to reading without any pre-reading activity. This can be very troublesome for  a lot of readers. They just go in and read without knowing anything about it. This leads to very shallow reading and confused students. That is why pre-reading activities can help a student a lot while reading. there are many types of activities that you can do with your students before they start reading. Five things that pre-reading strategies should do are "access their[the students] prior knowledge, interact with portions of the text prior to reading, practice sequencing, find cause and effect relationships, draw comparisons, make inferences, and predict, identify vocabulary that might be a problem, and construct meaning before they[the students] begin reading the text"(Beers 74). These are all ideas that will help students read better. Now I want to show some of these strategies that will be useful.
Anticipation guides: 
These are simply a set of statements that make students think hard about them. These texts also help them "make a personal connection to what they will be reading"(Beers 75). Using them to start class based discussion can be very beneficial. Instead of some questions you make up on the spot these guide students to higher thinking and more connectivity to the reading. It is important to have controversial statements on the anticipation guide. If they are questions with no controversy the conversations will be dull and uninspiring. The controversy makes students more passionate and willing to dive into discussion to defend their opinion.
Here is an example of an anticipation guide used in a history class before reading Anne Franks diary. While it is not a perfect example it has good points to make and is used before and after the reading.

Probable Passage:
This strategy is used to help students find out what a story could be about. Many times students will have trouble even opening a book. This is because they have no idea what it is about. Probable passage "helps stop those passive reading habits by encouraging students to make predictions, to activate their prior knowledge about a topic, [...], to make inferences, and to form images about a text" (Beers 87). All of these make the student more engaged in the reading. To use one you just take a summary of the text and take out some of the words and give them to the students. They get to infer what think it will be about form those few key words they have. This makes it more fun for them and they get to see if what they thought would happen actually happens in the book. Here is an example of a sheet that you would use for a Probable passage.

These are just two of the many pre-reading strategies you can use with students. The focus on helping the reader be more engaged with what they are about to read. It helps activate prior knowledge and encourage the student to read more actively. This will help readers get more out of what they are reading in and outside of class.