Reading Skill Surgery!

When it comes time to start preparing for testing we need to review all of the reading skills that we have learned. At the end of the year it is also a great idea to review all of your skills. You could even review last years skills at the beginning of the year!
The best way to review all of the skills is through Reading Skill Surgery! It is a one day reading event that would take place in your classroom. Your students are engaged from beginning to end and they are reviewing so many skills!

How this works:

1. Students become surgeons
You tell the students they will be doctors for the day.
You can give them these doctors masks and gloves to add to the excitement! (If you click on the picture you will be taken to an affiliate link)

2. You give them a patient
Each group or student will receive a patient. They will get a paper that tells the student what the patient came in to the hospital for and what is hurting them. It will also tell them that they need to check all of the body parts to come up with the diagnosis.

3. The students read passages and answer questions for each part of the body.
The students will read a passage and answer the corresponding question. The question will be practicing one reading skill. They bring their answer to their supervisor (you or a volunteer). If the supervisor deams the answer correct they get to perform an operation.

4. They perform an operation!
You need an operation game. I alway borrow these from parents for the day. When the group or student gets to perform an operation they have to pull that part out of the patients body without hitting the side. If they hit the side they have to fill out an “incident report”. The incident report is more questions pertaining to the paragraph. They keep doing incident reports until they successfully pull the body part out of the operation game.

5. They go to the testing room and retrieve their results!
You put real life x-rays into envelopes for each body part! The students get to go to that body part and grab either a bad x-ray or a healthy x-ray. They take it back to their patient to determine if they have something wrong with that body part or not!

6. They do this for 8 body parts!
They repeat these steps for 8 different body parts. So, their patient could end up with nothing wrong or have several body parts that are having problems! While doing this they are working on main idea and detail, context clues, theme, text features, text structure, character traits, literal/nonliteral language, and point of view.

7. They diagnose their patient
When they are done they look at all their x-rays and diagnose what is wrong with their patient. Then, we let them research to determine what they would need to do to heal the patient!

This whole process took almost an entire day for my students! You can split it up over several days or have a day full of challenge!

You can grab everything you need for this day of FUN and ENGAGEMENT here!

To add to engagement you can:
1. Have a doctor come in and speak to the class! My kids LOVE this each year!
2. Add extra decor around your room, like actually drawing out the patient or keeping different areas for each step.
3. Play a heart rate monitor on youtube in the background all day!
4. Dressing up!

For set up you need to:
1. Get an operation game
2. Print the passages, laminate if wanted, and hang them around the room.
3. Print incident reports and laminate for less paper waste.
4. Print a patient for each group or student
5. Print a mixture of both healthy and unhealthy x-rays and put them in an envelope. Label the envelope with the title of the body part.