Reading Activities that Get Students Moving in Upper Elementary

If you are looking for some new reading activities that get students moving in upper elementary, then you have got to check out these Choose Your Path Reading Comprehension Scavenger Hunts.

Guess who just got hitched? It’s two of my own personal childhood favorites!

Yep. The scavenger hunt and choose your path story just got married. 💍

Imagine this. Your students eagerly search around the classroom to find scavenger hunt cards. Each card reveals part of a fiction story with reading comprehension questions leading to the next card. At some parts of the story, students are asked to choose a path, leading to twists and turns in the plot. There are 23 cards with 4 possible story paths! Every path is sure to provide a valuable reading experience and practice with important skills that aid in reading comprehension.

Finding good reading activities that get students moving in upper elementary is sometimes hard, especially if you want to keep them engaged in learning throughout the process. The way this activity is set up, students can’t skip ahead. They have to find the right card at the right moment in the story in order to move on. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they are forced to go back to their previous location and reassess their choices. Your students will be moving around the room with a purpose…to see their story through to the end, all while practicing reading comprehension and ELA skills.

9 Different Reading Activities that Get Students Moving in Upper Elementary

These Choose Your Path Scavenger Hunts are so much fun, you’ll want to plan several ‘hunts’ throughout the year. Luckily, there’s a whole slew of high-interest stories to choose from.

There are 9 Choose Your Path stories in this resource line. Here are the topics, with links to the individual resources:

• Dragon Adventure
• Alien Encounter
• Magical Forest
• Amusement Park
• River Rafting
• Zoo Adventure
• Treasure Hunt
• Island Shipwreck
• Detective Mystery

If you love the idea of using the Choose Your Path Scavenger Hunts with your class and want them all, they are available in a money-saving bundle. Grab it here!

Now that you have the resources, we can start the process of prepping. Don’t worry, it is a simple printing/cutting prep job.

Preparing the activity

For a reading activity that gets students moving in upper elementary, this lesson is super easy to prep. All you have to do is print out a recording and retelling page for each student, make copies of each card, cut them out, and project the START card on the board for all the students to read. Then simply place the scavenger hunt cards around the room.

What’s on the cards?

Each scavenger hunt card in the Choose Your Path activity includes a single part of the larger story. The cards also include ELA skills-based questions about the passage. Each answer is labeled with a letter and number that leads to the card with the next part of the story.

How do students complete the activity?

As students move through the story, some of the questions will be skills-based and have correct right/wrong answers. Other questions will be decision-based questions that allow students to make a choice about what the characters will do next. Depending on how students answer those, their path will lead in a different direction.

When students finish their story, they will write a retelling of the story on their documentation sheet.

Assessment

As they go, students will document the letters and numbers of their choices on their recording sheets. See the image below. 

Each resource has four possible paths for students to go down, and answer keys for each path are included. 

Note: These resources are mostly self-checking as an incorrect answer to a question will lead to a number/letter combination that doesn’t exist on a card. This will lead students back to the previous card to try again with the correct answer. 

As far as marriages go, I think this one is going to last for a long time. This awesome blend of choose your own path and scavenger hunt has resulted in 9 fresh and fun reading activities that get students moving in upper elementary while they’re also working on ELA skills, collaborating with others, and practicing writing.

If you love these high-interest topics, and you’re looking for an additional way to challenge your learners, check out this blog post that talks about our Curiosities resource!