I’ve been working on a presentation on reading strategies and updated my “Open Mind” Template for Google Slides. An “Open Mind” activity is pretty simple. Students insert words or images into the mind of a character or person they’ve been reading about. (For example for Romeo Montague a student could put a heart and say that Romeo is in love.) This works particularly well for language learners because they can insert an image and then talk about why they chose that image. Since it’s a Google slide, you could also have students do it collaboratively- two working on it at the same time or even put several in a slide deck and ask students to fill in for different characters and then students could guess which character was which or explain to each other why they think those particular images were chosen. Students can justify their answer in the speaker notes portion of the slides.
I’ve included two templates in the slide deck. One is a basic open mind and the second is a “says, does, and thinks” where students separate out what the character says, does and thinks. I also like this one for language learners because it gives them practice using structures like “he thinks that…” “she says that…” If you were working on the subjunctive you could also use for wants and wishes. So much fun!
Click on the photos to make a copy of the Open Mind Template.