Reading in your Classroom

I would like to share something that has been very helpful to me this year in my classroom. One of the things I have struggled with is getting mys students to read from the textbooks and to comprehend what they have read. The A+ PC Repair and Troubleshooting textbook I use with my Juniors is about 3 inches thick. There are a lot of pictures and charts, but there is also a great deal of text. For the year and a half I have been back in teaching I have found that Juniors and Seniors in my high school have very poor reading and comprehension skills. Worst than that is they just hate reading.
Greene County sent me to an in-service taught by Mark A. Forget, Ph.D. (pronounced 4-jay not forget) on Max Teaching with Reading and Writing. The MAX teaching Framework (Motivate, Acquisition, and eXtension covered a great deal of material. One of the classroom activities I gleaned from this in-service has worked pretty well for me. I use Anticipation Guides now in my class. These anticipation Guides are used to motivate the students as readers by getting them to react to a series of statements that are related to the content of the reading materials and also to the student's prior knowledge. Students are able to anticipate or react to what the reading material will be about because of the anticipation guide statements.
I received a 260 page manual by Dr. Forget in this in-service. It goes into great detail on his MAX reading / Writing strategies. There is an entire chapter on 'How to Construct Effective Anticipation Guides". A book worth getting. An in-service worth attending.
I am just really getting into using the Anticipation Guides. They do take some time to construct, but they are well worth it. One side note. Be prepared to have to stop students from straying off the topic and going down paths where you should not go. Teenagers - they do that to you.