Tea Party

 The name ‘Tea Party’ doesn’t sound exceptionally promising, but this strategy actually has many useful components.

For the ‘Tea Party’ strategy, students are put into small groups to predict and discuss what they think a certain text will be about.

To facilitate and lead this discussion, the teacher will select short sentences /phrases /quotes from the text and write them on note cards.

The students will then evaluate these statements and think about/predict what they could mean in the story and share, developing a plan or ‘schema’ for the text.

What I really like about this strategy is that it’s a preview for the text. The teacher has the freedom to select passages, and these passages can directly influence student predictions. I thought that it could also be fun for the teacher and students—perhaps the selected quotes will be intriguing, thought-provoking, quirky, weird, or even scary. I think that by pulling pieces out of the story before actually reading, students will find themselves more connected and more willing to actually start reading.