Children generally make personal connections to text, which are at the surface level. In order to know what is important, we need to guide children into deeper levels of comprehension. This guidance must take place before they read. Anticipation guides are also used during reading to help children monitor their comprehension. Anticipation guides facilitate deeper comprehension of text and help students develop metacognition. Through the use of anticipation guides, children know what to look for as they read. As they use the guides, they discover that they have an increased interest in wanting to read so that they can verify their predictions. The guides build in children a strong need to know. (Polette, 2005)
Anticipation Guide Process
- Choose a text.
- Create the Anticipation Guide by constructing a series of statements about specific items in the text; some true and some false.
- Either display the cover or read the opening paragraph and ask the children to answer each question with either yes, no or maybe. The emphasis is not on right answers or to make correct predictions. We want them to form a working hypothesis about the text.
- Read the text aloud. As you read, ask children to let you know when they have found the correct answer to each statement. You should read slowly and stop at places in the text that correspond to each of the statements.
- Bring closure to the reading by revisiting each of the statements.
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