The Daily 5 in Grades 6-12: Boxplots Partner Reading

This post is the 2nd in a series devoted to adapting the literacy tenets of "The Daily 5" to a secondary classroom with 50 minute periods. You can catch the whole series here.

Daily 5 Tenet #3 - READ TO SOMEONE

Sit some seniors down in a classroom and tell them they're going to read to each other. They'll look at you almost as skeptically as I did this summer when a colleague had us do it at a reading training over the summer.

"Really," they think. "Do we have to," they ask. "Yep," You will answer.

I modeled it with a different random book I pulled out of the reading corner in my room, and I think that took some of the hesitancy out of it. Granted, my AP Stats students are usually up for anything, but I had full participation in this partner read today with no groaning and pleading.

Here was the text from our textbook, The Practice of Statistics, 2nd Ed.

Not the most engaging passage ever, but certainly not bad by textbook standards, and definitely high on ease of implementation.

How Do I Do This?

A partner read is as simple as it sounds. Two students take turns reading paragraphs to each other. Depending on the individual students' reading levels, partner read could be an opportunity to practice:

• vocabulary building
• reading fluently
• listening to fluent reading
• auditory comprehension
• monitoring for understanding

You may be wondering, "Why not just have students read to themselves silently? I'd rather have that than a dozen kids all reading aloud at once."

I don't think I'm alone on this, and I know I've seen students do it - how often do you skip over information that ended up being important when you are reading to yourself? Yes, skimming is a great technique for speed reading, and is wonderful for getting the gist of an entire article, but I've seen my students routinely discover a few key words they missed reading to themselves after I make them read back to me aloud.

To The Next Level

Reading is always better with writing! Since your students will already be in partners, to wrap up the activity, I had them agree upon 2 summary statements for the passage. Here are a few samples.

I felt like these turned out more as facts-from-the-text than they were summary statements, but once they were shared in class, we got a clearer picture from their parts together.