Helping Educators Work Effectively with English Language Learners
Anticipation Guides
Anticipation activities provide students with an opportunity to preview concepts and language that will be encountered in a lesson or text. Some anticipation activities accomplish this by asking students to agree or disagree with inferential statements on lesson topics before reading the text or engaging in other lesson activities. Others may ask students to demonstrate what they may already know about the topic before it is formally introduced (e.g., list five facts or answer true or false questions). Anticipation activities are most effective when they connect back to the students’ background, activate prior knowledge students may have about the topic, and provide a purpose for the learning task.
To provide you with specific examples of how an anticipation activity can be used for different student needs and content areas, CAL SIOP facilitators developed several samples:
New! Predict-O-Gram Activity
A new elementary-level Predict-O-Gram activity based on the story Peppe the Lamplighter by Elisa Bartone is now available and can be used in contexts of Social Studies or Language Arts. The introductory page provides an overview of language and content objectives that support this learner activity, instructions for use, and benefits this activity provides for English learners. A “Story Map” Predict-O-Gram sample follows and includes two versions that address high and low levels of scaffolding. This Story Map Predict-O-Gram showcases how multiple SIOP Model features can be incorporated into a single learner activity.
Download the Predict-O-Gram activity. 
Differentiated Anticipation Guides
The following are three versions of an anticipation activity for use with students at different English proficiency levels as well as an explanation of each version. The pre-unit anticipation activity presented here was used to address the SIOP Building Background component in a sheltered 7th grade History lesson on reasons Westward expansion occurred.
The “Explanation of Activities” provides an overview of each of the anticipation activity documents (A, B, and C versions) that range in the degree of scaffolding, and offers a number of other suggestions concerning broadly applicable differentiation strategies for the classroom.
