ELL Strategy: Admission Slips

Every teacher on the planet has heard about the exit slip now- they’re a great way to assess student understanding of a topic or what the students learned during a lesson, and can be useful for making instructional decisions.

But, have you ever considered the idea of using an admission slip? An admission slip is a short activity or task that students are asked to complete before a lesson. It can be assigned as homework, or done at the beginning of a lesson as a warm-up, and gives you a chance to assess prior knowledge and help students set a purpose for reading or learning. Additionally, it helps to focus students on the reading or topic of study for the day by preparing questions, responses, ideas or predictions that anticipate the content of the reading or the lesson topic for the day.

Here are some ideas for admission slips:

• Have students look at a series of pictures that are from the text or related to the topic of study and generate three questions they think the text or lesson will answer

• Have students skim an article, looking at the images, headlines and section headings, then make a prediction on what the text is about

• Have students create a KWL chart to determine what they know and what they’d like to know about the upcoming topic of study

• Have students make a few connections between the topic of the reading and their personal experience or existing background knowledge

I would love to hear more about how or if you are using this strategy in your classroom!