Probable Passage
What is it? Probably passage is a pre-reading activity that helps students determine and focus on characters, vocabulary, setting, conflicts and resolutions. In this activity, the teacher picks 8 to 15 key terms from within the assigned reading. Working collaboratively in small groups, students will categorize the terms and create a “gist statement,” or a summary of what they believe the reading will be about. Students also create a list of what they hope to discover in the reading based on words they determined to be unknown.
Why is it important in the music classroom? Music and texts regarding music – be it composers, periods, theory or any number of things – often include complicated vocabulary. This may be the single most important reason to use probably passage when prepping students to read musical text. How is it implemented? The teacher chooses 8 to 15 key words that summarize the main ideas of the chose text and creates categories the students will separate the words into. Before asking students to perform the activity, the teacher will model the strategy using words related to the topic or within the same subject. The teacher should take special care to think aloud so that students know what is required. Before releasing students to work on their own, the teacher provides the students with clear directions. The students only use the unknown column when a word is truly unknown to them. Students also need to know how many words to use when creating their gist statement. The teacher must also remind students that it does not matter whether the gist statement was right or wrong, but rather how they differed in determining their gist statements. After reading through gist statements, the teacher will discuss what the students hoped to discover when reading the text. Which strategies are used when doing a Probable Passage?
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