Thieves: Stealing Information from Informational Text

Students use previewing skills in their everyday lives to decide what foods to eat, clothes to buy, and movies to watch. Using a strategy called THIEVES, which is an acronym for Title, Headings, Introduction, Every first sentence in a paragraph, Visuals and vocabulary, End-of-chapter questions, and Summary, enhances comprehension and retention of the information and ideas encountered during reading or viewing media. Previewing helps students to create a "mental map" that can be used as the reader moves through the text based on the general structure of the text.

Implementation

1. This pre-reading strategy helps students to build effective pre-reading habits and works especially well with expository text.
2. The THIEVES acronym guides students through all the necessary pre-reading steps before attempting to read a textbook chapter.
3. THIEVES helps students to build background knowledge related to the text material before they actually begin reading.
4. Tell students something such as, “We are now going to become information thieves. We are going to see how much information we can steal from the chapter before we actually read it.”
5. Model how to go through each of the items in the THIEVES process. You may want to record answers on the overhead as you model.
6. After going through steps 1 and 2, have students use the THIEVES Practice Sheet, with another section of text. This can be done either individually or with a partner.

Classroom Management

1. Review the Thieves Model (Copyright 2003 IRA/NCTE. All rights reserved. ReadWriteThink materials may be reproduced for educational purposes).

Title

• What do I think I will be reading about?
• What do I already know about this topic?
• What does this topic have to do with information in preceding chapters?
• Does the title express a point of view?

Headings

• What do the headings tell me about the topic I will be reading about?
• Pick one heading; what is the topic of the paragraph beneath it?
• How can I turn this heading into a question that is likely to be answered in the text?

Introduction

• Is there an opening paragraph, perhaps italicized?
• How does the first paragraph introduce the main idea or topic you will be reading about?
• What do I already know about this topic?

Every First Sentence in a Paragraph

• What do I think this chapter is going to be about based on the first sentence in each paragraph?

Visuals and Vocabulary

• Does the chapter include photographs, drawings, maps, charts, or graphs?
• What can I learn from the visuals in a chapter?
• What is the most important visual in the chapter.
• How do captions help me better understand the meaning of the visual?
• Is there a list of key terms and definitions?
• Are there important words in boldface type throughout the chapter?
• What do I know about any of the boldfaced words?
• Am I able to tell the meaning of boldfaced words from the sentences in which they are embedded?

End-of-Chapter questions

• What information do they earmark as important?
• What information can I learn from the questions?
• Keep in mind the end-of-chapter questions so that I can annotate the text as to where pertinent information is located.

Summary

• What do I understand and recall about the topics covered in the summary?

2. Tell students something such as, “We are now going to become information thieves. We are going to see how much information we can steal from the chapter before we actually read it.”

3. Guided practice: Model how to deploy each of the items in the THIEVES process.

4. After completing steps 2 and 3, have students use a THIEVES Practice Sheet, with another section of text.