When faced with difficult or challenging reading material, use this note-taking guide to prompt your critical reading and thinking skills.  It is important to see reading as an active endeavor, rather than a passive activity.

Visualize
Draw an image and/or use your own words to describe the people, places, objects you “see” while reading this material.

Find Answers
1) Identify & DEFINE Words you don’t know
2) Identify & DEFINE Unfamiliar Historical or Cultural References

Notice Unique Text
Find, List, & Describe the importance of text that looks different.
(This includes size, color, italics, bold, underlined, separated, repeated, different language, etc.)

 Synthesize Prior Knowledge
Identify & Explain how specific prior knowledge helped you understand this material.

 Make Inferences & Predictions
1) Identify any area of the text that required an educated guess or assumption.
2) Identify a possible future outcome (if any) of the situation described in the story.

 Make Comparisons
Text-to-Self: Compare an issue in the work to a specific incident from your personal life.
Text-to-Text: Compare any issue in the work to a fictional work (story, book, film, show, play, etc.)Text-to-World: Compare the incident to a historical event.