Rivet

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Home : 2005 : October : 18

Rivet
By nuhusker98

On the first day of a new story, I use a four-block strategy called RIVET. It is supposet to "rivet" the kids attention to the selection. To do this activity, you first need to identify the vocabulary you want to teach,
along with several key words in the story. Then you make a transparency with blank lines for every letter in every word you want to do. For example if your words were lair, gorged, and forlorn, your transparency would look like:
___ ___ ___ ___
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
You give clues to each word, maybe the definition, maybe an example or a synonym,

and reveal letters as the students make attempts at the word. As they get each word, write maybe a one or two word clue alongside the word so they can remember what it means. After you introduce all of the key vocabulary and important words in the story, you have the students work in pairs to write two to three sentences that predict what the story might be about. After they have their predictions, they can open their books, and preview the story to see if they may be on the right track. Usually after we do this activity, I let the students listen to the audiotape version of the story or read it with a partner. My kids love this! I hope I explained it well enough!