Exploring Diversity: My Identities and the Identities of Others

An anchor chart is an artifact of classroom learning. Like an anchor, it holds students' and teachers' thoughts, ideas and processes in place. Anchor charts can be displayed as reminders of prior learning and built upon over multiple lessons.

This strategy provides tools to create questions that help students engage critically with Perspectives central texts and examine them for issues of power and social inequity. The activities suggested here also encourage readers to bring their knowledge and experiences to the reading of a text.

This strategy gives students tools to use when exploring, thinking about and discussing read-aloud texts.

Children will learn about the key components of paper and online text structure. Students will also gain the terminology necessary to talk about the structure and parts of a text.

This strategy exposes students to literature that places out-group identities at the center of the curriculum.

Realia are real-life objects that enable children to make connections to their own lives as they try to make sense of new concepts and ideas. This strategy brings the Perspectives central text to life for students by using everyday objects during the read aloud.

Student journals are a collection of students’ written and illustrated predictions, reactions, understandings and questions based on Perspectives central text read alouds.

This strategy includes text type charts and matching exercises to help students differentiate between Perspectives central text types, increasing their ability to read, comprehend and produce those forms.

Students explore the same Perspectives central text from various viewpoints and identify author, speaker point-of-view, publication date, intended audience and characters.

Using either a Perspectives central text or their original work, children take on the role of “author,” reading the text aloud and facilitating a class discussion.

Challenge the Text helps students ask and answer their own text-dependent questions by taking multiple perspectives and uncovering assumptions and biases within the text.

During Cracking the Code, students examine texts for bias related to race, gender, class, religion, age and sexual orientation, among other identity categories.

Students make connections to read-aloud texts by relating the text to themselves (lived experiences), to other texts (read in any setting) and to the world (current and historical events)

During a readers’ theater, two or more students dramatize a text by reading expressively.

During shared reading, learners observe experts reading with fluency and expression while following along or otherwise engaging with the text. This strategy should focus on a specific instructional element (or mini lesson) that improves targeted reading comprehension skills while promoting the joy of reading.

Think Aloud requires readers to stop during their reading to think, reflect and discuss their process. Readers talk about skipping text, rereading, searching back in the text for information, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, making connections, reflecting, predicting and visualizing.