I’ve been slowly re-vamping my units to include more interpretive reading and I’ve been using Google Forms for the reading. This is a Choose Your Own reading activity that asks students to choose an animal to adopt as part of a bigger Adopt an Animal mini-unit. Here’s the great cool part: it has different choices based on their answers, so that there are basically four different possibilities for reading.
Here’s how to do it.
Go to section
To make the choose your own, you have students go to a different “section” in the form based on their answer. That process is simple enough, but it is helpful to plan out your sections ahead of time. First, I plan, then I make sections with those titles, and lastly I add questions. Here’s my planning document for this form:
Pro-tip: Have an end page where everyone does the same thing at the end. It’s just helpful for setting up the form to have everyone dumped back to a common destination. In this form, the students all get dumped back to a page where they write about why they chose the animal they chose.
So for my reading, first students say whether they want a dog or a cat. Then based on that they go to a different page.
I do not know much about cats because cats make me go to the ER and have breathing treatments and weeks of prednisone, so I had to ask some people about what kind of traits cat lovers look for when I was building my form. Also, I told students if they didn’t like cats or dogs to pretend they did. Maybe I’ll update it for other animals and maybe I’ll just continue to tell them to pretend.
Once they choose a characteristic, students have three animals with those characteristics to choose from. I added those by taking a screen shot and then inserting the image.
And then lastly, students tell why.
You can try out my Adopt an Animal Choose Your Own yourself by clicking here.
To learn more about how to set up this type of form you can watch this video. (Not about reading, but a survey for after school. It’s the same idea.)