According to Chastain (1988), the purpose of pre-reading activities is to motivate the students to want to read the assignment and to prepare them to be able to read it. With this in mind, we can see that the concept of reading is elevated beyond being a skill to be mastered. Instead, our end goal is for children to appreciate and consequently love and embrace the habit of Reading .

Chastain added that a long time ago, the major emphasis has been on the product rather than the process of reading itself. Because of this thinking, pre-reading preparation has consisted little more than the following:

“Tomorrow’s reading is really interesting! Read the whole text, pages 32 to 38, and write in complete sentences the answer to the questions on page 39.”

Being a preschool teacher, I cannot just right away demand the students to read this book and share their insights the following day. In my school, we believe that it is never too early to read. Because we are trying to develop early readers, it is but proper that we prepare them thoroughly with the process of reading… and this preparation includes building motivation- which can be embedded in pre-reading activities that are imperative before immersing the students with the reading task.

Conceptualizing pre-reading activities in preschool can be exciting, and definitely intellectually stimulating. Thus, before I come up with activities, I have these assumptions in mind:

1. Children are more receptive to activities that are within the context of play.
2. Children are multi-sensorial.
3. Some children have limited English vocabulary.
4. Some children are high performers, some are low performers.
5. Children have to be presented with ideas that they can somehow connect to their existing schemas- hence, they have to be able to relate these ideas to their lives.

Below are some pre-reading activities/games that I have presented to my students, and have somehow produced favorable results.

1. Picture Peeker- This activity builds excitement as children slowly, but excitingly unravel the mystery picture. What I do is I prepare a big illustration of an important figure, object, person, or animal from the story I will be presenting. I will cover this big picture with strips of paper that can contain words or drawings of some objects ,etc. that they will also be encountering from the story. Then, I will ask questions and children are to answer by choosing among the smaller pictures (the ones covering the big picture). Once they find the answer, they will remove the picture of that answer. So with this, anticipation builds as we slowly discover the mystery picture. Once it is revealed, we usually do word webbing to expound vocabulary.
2. Giggle with Riddle- This activity never fails to capture children’s attention. With this activity, I prepare pictures from the story then at the back, I write down the riddle that they will be guessing. Once all riddles are solved, we talk about the pictures again to expound vocabulary.
3. The Classic Guessing Game- Sometimes, when I run out of time preparing pictures or instructional materials, I just pick out some real objects, stash them somewhere to hide them, then I present easy and fast questions so they can guess what the items I’m hiding. This is an easy-to-prepare yet effective pre-reading activity.
4. Preschool Henyo- This activity was inspired by Eat Bulaga’s henyo game. What I do is I call one student who would guess a particular word. This student will sit in front of his/her classmates, then I will stick a picture (from the story I will be presenting) on his/her forehead. I will tell the student to ask questions about the mystery picture on his forehead and his/her classmates can answer only with a yes, no, or can be. As exciting as this activity may seem, you cannot help it if some classmates would suddenly blurt out the answer. That’s why you really need to make the instructions clear prior to the game. Also, it can be time consuming that’s why I limit the number of pictures to those that are really significant in the story. What I like about this game is that it also builds the children’s questioning skills.
5. Brainstorming- This is again an easy-to-prepare game. To do this, I gather some pictures or real objects that will appear in the story I will be presenting. I get one item at a time and pass it around. Once the object lands on them, they are to describe or say something about it. Then I write down their inputs. After all items are described, we read and expound their ideas. What I like about this is that the level of participation is high, as all kids are kind of required to say something about the object on hand.
6. Bulging Backpack/Feely Box- This is just one way to make the presentation more enticing before we do vocab building. Objects or things from the story to be presented will be stashed inside a back pack or feely box. One by one, the students will be putting their hands inside and ‘feel’ an object. They will describe the object and then guess it. Once all items are out, we then do vocab building.
7. Tongue Twisters- What I do is I come up with a tongue twister sentence that is about the story that I will be presenting… for example, A golden haired girl gobbled a gooey gum.. for the story Goldilocks. I let them repeat this sentence one by one. We usually end up laughing after this activity.
8. Flip the pic-  This is a variant of picture peeker- instead of ripping off pictures, we just flip them around to reveal the mystery picture at the back. What I do is I prepare a big illustration of a picture from the story, say a goat from the story Billy Goats Gruff.  I cut this picture into squares.  Then at the back of the squares, I put in smaller drawings or illustrations of some items that they will also see in the story, for example, grass, bridge, etc… We do guessing game and to answer, children will pick the picture and flip it. Like picture peeker, we get to see bits and pieces of the mystery picture… something that would really make the children giddy with excitement..
9. Rhyming Game-  Once students understand the concept of rhyming, I can already come up with rhyme time game that can be formulated into a pre-reading activity… It is kind of like a guessing game also.  For example, before presenting the story ‘Gum on the Drum’, I let them guess the mystery word in this rhyme… O what plenty of hair, at the back of the ______(bear)… then we discuss something about the bear, what it can do, what it looks like, etc…
10. The classic I spy- The teacher puts some objects around the classroom that children are to find, or sometimes, the teacher can also alter some features. When we play I spy, I really take time and effort in preparing the classroom environment.  With this, by the time the kids enter the classroom, they get excited right away, and start asking questions about these changes.  For example, before presenting the story ‘Wacky Wednesday’ we really ‘mess up’ the classroom, turn books upside down, stick some shoes on the ceiling, put in some wacky drawings…etc.

So there you have it, some games and pre-reading activities that I do before story telling… And to add to that, these activities in themselves are not as effective without the proper execution of the teacher… The teacher herself should get the feel of the moment so she can share the excitement with the students….

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 8:25 am and is filed under Teacher Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.