Highlighter Activity

Dr. Behrens taught us how to use a highlighter activity in class that really caught my attention. The highlighter activity is a way to build metacognition for students. This is an activity that may not work very well with students at a young age because there may be many things they do not understand quite well yet. For this activity,  students will read a passage and highlight with two different colored highlighters. (Choose two highlighters that make a different color when they overlap.) The example in class had blue and pink highlighters that made the color purple when they overlapped. As students are reading, they will highlight what they do not understand in pink and highlight when they do understand in blue. When they reread, they can see what they can change to the color purple using their metacognitive strategies. Using this activity can not only help to build metacognition, but it can be used to summarize, predict, reread, clarifying, connecting, questioning, and using context clues. I think this would be a very engaging activity that does not require much knowledge to do. It is very simple, for a student to use one color highlighter as highlight what they know with previous knowledge and then reread the passage to go over what they did not quite understand and see where they blend. I will definitely use this in my classroom. Highlighters are so much fun :)