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 Grades 3–5 Reading Activities
Make Me an Offer
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This activity may provide a good use for some of the junk mail
that comes to your home. Every day we receive offers for new credit
cards, products, games, or prizes. Reading and understanding these
offers require locating small details and determining which facts
are important.
Here's what you need:
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| An offer for a product, credit card, game, or prize (on
a piece of junk mail or the back of a cereal box, for example) |
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| Pen or highlighter |
Here's what you do:
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When you receive an offer for a product in the mail, take a moment
to look at it with your child. Read and discuss the details of the
offer. Where are they located? How are they presented? What does a
reader have to know in order to determine what is really being offered?
Have you really won a million dollars (as the envelope might claim)?
Encourage your child to highlight the details of the offer and read
the fine print. Also, she will need to read and determine what is
most important in order to decide what to highlight.
Have your child summarize the most important details of the offer
in a few short sentences. After going over these critical details,
discuss whether your family should be interested in the offer. Or,
you might have her compare and contrast one offer with another, then
explain which offer she prefers and why. Talk about other places offers
are found: cereal boxes, the Internet, or billboards, for example.
You could take this one step further by discussing the purposes of
the offers.
Keep going...
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This activity highlights the importance of paying close attention
to details (especially those presented in fine print). Additionally,
the activity reveals some of the common features of persuasive writing,
where paying attention to details is particularly important. Continue
to look closely at advertisements, offers, and any persuasive language
that you and your child see. When thinking about the language, ask
such questions as, “What does the ad on the side of the bus
tell us? What other details would we need to find out about it?”
These conversations will help your child grasp the importance of understanding
the facts and details in what she reads.
Grades 3–5 Reading Activities
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