ACTIVE

Your Name: Katelin Keacher #13

Strategy name: ACTIVE

Student appropriate grade levels: grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Tags: reading comprehension strategy, ACTIVE, ask, connect, track down, infer, visualize, eureka

Content areas: Language Arts, and Social Studies. It can be tweaked to fit a Science text.

Type of Strategy: During-Reading Comprehension Strategy

Types of Students: Linguistic, Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal.

Strategy Description: ACTIVE is a reading comprehension strategy created to get students actively engaging with the text.
 * The **A** stands for ask. In this section, students create meaningful questions to ask about the story they are currently reading and find the answers as they continue reading.
 * The **C** stands for connect. During this step, students create text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections while they are reading.
 * The **T** stands for track down, where students track down or determine the important information. This can be done using a T chart, where students would determine what information is interesting and what information is actually important. Another way to do this is by giving cut up post-it notes to the students and having them mark what they think is important in the text with one of the post-it strips.
 * The **I** stands for infer. In this section, students make inferences while they are reading. A way to teach this to students is by telling them to "read between the lines".
 * The **V** stands for visualize, where students create and draw their own visualizations of what is happening in the story.
 * The final letter, **E**, stands for Eureka! (Synthesis). During this step, students share how the individual parts of the story all come together to create something new.

Strategy implementation example:

A: Ask

 * ======Who is the stranger?======
 * ======What did Farmer Bailey hit?======
 * ======Why is the man trying to run away?======
 * ======Why can’t the stranger speak?======
 * ======Where does the stranger go at the end of the book?======

C: Connect

 * ======Text-to-Self: This reminds me of the time I went on a field trip to a farm and met a farmer. He showed us the machines he uses to harvest his crops and also showed us the farm animals.======
 * ======Text-to-Text: This story reminds me of the movie //Lilo and Stitch// because Stitch is hit by a car and taken to a pound. Then Lilo adopts him and he lives with them.======
 * ======Text-to-World: This story reminds me of how different cultures believe that different gods/goddesses are responsible for things that happen in the world, like weather, love, fertility, nature, fire, etc.======

T: Track Down

 * ======Important Information: Farmer Bailey hits a man in his truck. The man stays with Farmer Bailey and his family. The man doesn’t speak. The man is responsible for the leaves changing colors.======
 * ======Interesting Information: The little girl Katy is curious about the stranger. The doctor’s thermometer is broken and he leaves it at Farmer Bailey’s house.======

I: Infer

 * ======The stranger is somehow related to nature because he can hold the rabbit.======
 * ======He is also responsible for the leaves changing colors.======
 * ======The stranger is responsible for breaking the thermometer because the doctor took his temperature and then the mercury in the thermometer is stuck at the bottom.======
 * ======The stranger cannot speak because he’s not “human”.======

V: Visualize

 * ======I can see the man who Farmer Bailey jump to his feet, run away, lose his balance, and fall down. I can also see Farmer Bailey help him up and take him to his truck. (Draw a picture of this scene on a sheet of paper: A man trying to run away, but looks like he is falling with a look of terror on his face and Farmer Bailey walking towards him.)======

=
All of the details of the story can stand alone, but together they make the story! For example, we know that Farmer Bailey hit a man, but if we didn’t put the next piece of the story together, that is all we’d know. Therefore, this story is about a farmer named Farmer Bailey who hits a man with his truck and ends up taking him home. The stranger never speaks. Farmer Bailey has a doctor come in and check the stranger to make sure he is okay. The stranger then helps the farmer on the field. The stranger notices that all the trees surrounding the farmer’s farm are orange and red and his are all green. He doesn’t like this, so he blows on a leaf and all of the trees turn orange and red. The stranger then leaves Farmer Bailey and his family. Every year, Farmer Bailey’s trees turn red and orange a week after all the other trees do, and it happens overnight. Farmer Bailey also finds etched in frost on the farmhouse windows are words that say, “See you next fall.”======