Scanning is useful when using a dictionary.
Reading is an essential ability for all students to learn while at school. An important aspect of reading, especially when teaching the ability to research and gather information quickly and accurately, is the ability to be able to scan a text for relevant information. Activities to practice scanning are many and can be turned into fun competitive games in the classroom.
Scanning Consonant Blends
Select an appropriate text for the level of your students and print it out on a standard sheet of paper. Hand the text out to your students. Read it through with your students so they can familiarize themselves with the text. Set a time limit, usually four or five minutes, and ask your students to identify how many "ch" sounds appear on the page. Whether they execute this task in pairs or alone is up to you. The winner of the task is the team or individual who has identified the most, or all, of the instances of the sound "ch" when the time runs out. Try the task again with different objectives, scanning for "st," "th," "gh" and "ph" sounds.
Scanning to Identify Keywords
This little game involves using the text that your students are studying. Make sure they each have a copy closed on the desk in front of them. Write two or three words on the board with page references. Count down from three and say, "Go." The students must find the keywords as quickly as possible by scanning the text to which the page references point. The first to finish is the winner. After a couple of rounds with the teacher involved, the task can be turned over to the students and they can identify keywords for each other to find.
Running Dictation Scanning Exercise
Prepare a paragraph of text and separate the individual sentences with random letters so the whole text looks like gibberish. Make sure there are no spaces between words. Print two or three copies, depending on how big your class is, and split your class into two or three equal teams. Move the teams to one end of the classroom and attach the copies of the text on the wall at the other end of the classroom. Their task is to run to the text, scan it for the intelligible text, remember as much as they can, run back to their team and dictate the text to a writer in the team. The first team to accurately reproduce the text fastest is the winning team.
Answering Content-Specific Questions Using Scanning
Prepare some relevant questions for a text that is currently being studied and write them on the board. Separate the class into pairs and ask each pair to prepare some questions of their own. Ask the pairs of students to join other pairs of students so the class is split into groups of four. In these teams, ask them to find the answers to your questions in the text as quickly as possible. When they have finished and the team that has most accurately answered the questions fastest has won, ask each pair of students to challenge the other pair in their team with the questions they have previously prepared. Stress that a balance between speed and accuracy is most important.
Tags: your students, class into, class split, each pair, Make sure, page references
