Tea Party

To begin this activity in the context of The Odyssey, you would first create small cards containing references to specific events within the story. You might include moments from Polyphemus' cave, Circe's island, the brush with the sirens, and the subplot involving the Penelope and her suitors.

You would then spread the cards around the room after the fashion of a gallery walk. The students would go around the room, in pairs or small groups, and attempt to make predictions based on the information you've given them. Collaboration is an integral part of this strategy. Collaboration during the prediction-forming stage is the most streamlined option, but a whole-class discussion could also serve this purpose.

Prediction is the key reading skill being trained with this strategy. I have noticed that students quite enjoy making predictions about stories in which they are invested, so the idea is that the investment will work in reverse. When given a text that they have already made predictions about, their instinct will be to keep reading in order to prove their predictions correct!

Texts like The Odyssey work well with this strategy because the plot progression is one with which we are all familiar. Every student has encountered a hero's journey in some form or another, so it is not a stretch to believe that their predictions will be more accurate than in the case of a more modern plot.

"As students are reading sections of their textbook, ask them to predict what they might learn in a particular section. Ask them to complete sentence stems such as, “From the title of this section, I predict that this section will tell us….” After reading, match predictions with actual content. How many predictions were accurate?"

Tankersley, Karen. The Threads of Reading : Strategies for Literacy Development, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3002085.