The six-grid organizer: Increasing student engagement in teacher read-alouds

Interactive read-alouds offer students a unique opportunity to connect with texts and allows them to sharpen their literacy skills through fostering student engagement and active listening. During such activities, students use visuals provided in the text to make predictions before reading, explore themes during reading, and summarize the plot. Instead of providing students with visuals, students can strengthen their ability to visualize linguistic cues by creating their own. Before reading a section of the text, teachers pre-teach vocabulary deemed necessary for comprehension using a visual format. While the section of text is read aloud by the teacher, students listen attentively and draw what they have visualized in a grid organizer using linguistic cues alone. During a brief pause after the section is read, students label their drawings with the pre-taught vocabulary. The teacher repeats this process for all sections of the text. Completed six-grid organizers become a tool to be used as an aid to promote expressive language and to recall and summarize the text. Engagement with mental imagery in this way promotes active listening and reading comprehension and its creation leads students to make personal connections to the text and, thus, more likely to comprehend, summarize, and recall information.