SPACE: Sentence Starters for Higher Order Thinking and Reflection

Have a few minutes to fill at the end of class? Have a little white space at the bottom of a worksheet? Here’s a way to put that time and space to good use with some higher order thinking and metacognition.

Throw the full page handout up on your projector and ask your students to choose one of the prompts (or you can direct them to summarize, process, analyze, connect, or evaluate as you desire), and write about what they learned today in class.

If you use reading logs or interactive notebooks, you can print multiple copies of the small (two per page) version and have students tape copies inside their notebooks. I printed a set of this smaller version on bright colored paper and laminated them for easy-to-find, ready-to-go exit slips.

I saw this idea in The Literacy TA and loved it immediately. I just made it a little more visually appealing and added additional sentence starters/explanations of the thinking processes involved. Hope you find it as useful as I do!

Looking for other reading response activities that can be used with any text? Give these a try:

• Twitter Summaries to Assess Understanding in Any Lesson

• Higher Order Thinking Formative Assessment Exit Slips