Grade 8 - Comprehend and Respond (Strategies and Skills)

PRESCRIBED LEARNING OUTCOMES

It is expected that students will:

• describe and assess the strategies they use for reading, viewing, and listening for various purposes
• use various strategies to cope with difficult or dense communications
• use a variety of resources to obtain background information
• identify and interpret the effect of literary techniques and figures of speech including foreshadowing, metaphor, alliteration, simile, and onomatopoeia

To view the prescribed learning outcomes for Comprehend and Respond (Strategies and Skills) in other grades click on an icon below.

SUGGESTED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

• Review note-taking skills such as how to pick out main ideas, or have students use web or flow charts to organize information while reading or viewing. Then ask students to practise taking notes as they watch a video; stop the video every few minutes so students can note important ideas. Suggest that they meet in small groups to compare and comment on each other's notes. Challenge each group to develop a set of guidelines for note taking while viewing; then ask groups to share these with the class.
• Explain how students can use context clues to help understand the meaning of new vocabulary. As students read a passage, have each highlight unfamiliar words and predict their meanings from other information in the text. Ask them to work in small groups to: discuss the words they highlighted and the meanings they predicted, explain their predictions, and then compare their definitions with dictionary definitions.
• Before reading or viewing, have students look at titles, illustrations, and diagrams to predict content, and then discuss their predictions as a class. As they read or view the material, ask them to note the accuracy of their predictions.
• Have students read an article in an electronic encyclopedia; have them identify unfamiliar words and try to predict their meanings before they click on the program's dictionary or thesaurus feature.

SUGGESTED ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES

• After each practice activity, have students add to an ongoing list of the skills and strategies that they are developing. Ask them to include brief descriptions of each, comments about which purposes, formats, media, or processes they have used, and examples of how and when they have used each. Students can keep their lists as charts, glossaries, notes in their notebooks, or as computer files. Ask them to review and comment on their lists regularly by responding to questions such as:
  • Which skills and strategies do you use most often? Why?
  • Which are difficult for you to apply? Why?
  • Which do you not fully understand or would like to practise?
  Offer feedback through written comments or individual or group conferences.
• Assess the content and organization of students' note taking. (They are likely to need guidance about which formats to use for different purposes, media, and situations.) Note the extent to which students are able to:
  • record key information accurately
  • include relevant detail
  • differentiate between key ideas and supporting detail
  • organize their notes to clarify the relationships among ideas
  • be concise and efficient (no extraneous material)
  • construct notes that are easy to follow (e.g., through the use of formatting and headings)

RECOMMENDED LEARNING RESOURCES

• Access to Reading & Language Arts
• The Issues Collection
• Mini Anthologies - Grade 7/8
• Stories from Asia
• Touching all the Bases
• Using Picture Storybooks to Teach Literary Devices
• What A Writer Needs

• MultiSource

• In Perspective

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