Two of Kylene Beers' reading strategy activities, printed here by permission:

Pre-reading Activity:

Tea Party
(Where people hear various snippets of conversation and attempt to piece together a cohesive whole)

Choose a poem, short piece of prose, or a few pages from a novel. (Kylene used the poem Grandmother Grace by Ronald Wallace.)

Select juicy sentences, phrases, or words from the reading and copy one per notecard. Plan duplicates of each notecard so students will have the opportunity to hear each one two or three times. Select the snippets with an eye toward multiple interpretations. (Some examples from Grandmother Grace: "how God wouldn't let the good person sink," "I didn't know this would be the last time," "GRACE," "with the angular rooms that trapped all my summers")

Put students in groups of three. (Older groups can be larger.)

Pass out a card to each student.

Students mingle, reading their card to each person who asks.

After a sufficient time (before the enthusiasm breaks down), return students to their groups. As a small group, students try to piece together the main idea of the passage. Students should be encouraged to make inferences, draw conclusions, and make predictions based on the lines they heard. They should not feel they will be evaluated on a correct re-construction of the original. (Some adult re-constructions of the Grandmother Grace snippets included: people on the Titanic before it went down, young love at a summer Bible camp, and an accident at summer camp.) The goal is to have students defend their conclusions, sequencing, and predictions based on the pieces of text they have.

During the discussion, the teacher should be circulating the classroom and recording comments to be used in debriefing. Students can identify the types of thinking skills demonstrated in the comments. (One way of making the invisible skills visible.)

Post-reading Activity:

Students write those four words across the top of a their paper and then decide which somebody in the story they want to discuss. They write that name under the word Somebody. Then they decide what that somebody wanted and write that under Wanted. Next, they tell the But--what happened to keep the Wanted from happening. Finally they decide the So column--the resolution. When they finish, they have one sentence.

Here's a SWBS statement a ninth grader made after reading "Forgive My Guilt" by Coffin: The man wanted to be forgiven for shooting the plovers, but they were dead and couldn't forgive him, so he carried his guilt the rest of his life.

A sixth grade resource student wrote this one for "The Story of Ping": The children wanted to be the emperor, but they cheated by switching the plants so they did not win.

If you use this with a long text (novel or even long short story), students should probably write a SWBS statement often. They can connect them with but, later, then, after, and. Also, students can look at point of view by writing a SWBS statement with different characters under the Somebody column. Finally, if you've got students who have trouble with seeing causal relationships (cause and effect), then give them the character you want them to make a SWBS statement for and give what you want in the But column. Now you are forcing them to think about the causes up to the But statement and then the effects (or resolution) afterward.