Traffic Lights

Green for true, red for false, and amber for the ones that are neither. The amber statements are the whole activity — and the real work is not answering them, it is writing them for somebody else.

Writing questions beats answering them. To write a good amber a child has to know exactly where the text stops.

Amber is where inference lives. “Not quite true” is a far better question than “false”.

A partner activity. One writes, one judges, then they argue. Both halves are assessment.

Model it on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free

The sheet it prints

The printable traffic lights sheet — a row of red, amber and green lights beside each statement line.

What is the traffic light reading activity?

One child writes a set of statements about something the class has read. Their partner reads each one and decides whether it is true (green), false (red) or somewhere in between (amber), colouring the light to match. Then they compare and argue about the ones they disagree on.

It looks like a true-or-false quiz and it is not one, because of the amber. A two-way sort can be done by matching words to the page. A three-way sort with a "not quite" option cannot — it needs the child to work out how far the text actually goes.

What makes a good amber statement?

This is the thing to teach explicitly, because children left to themselves write greens and reds and nothing else. An amber is a statement that is:

True of part of the book but not all of it. "Stanley is unlucky." True at the start, much less true by the end.
Nearly right but too strong. "Everyone at the camp hates him." Some of them do.
Probably true but never actually stated. "The Warden is frightened of being caught." Everything points at it; nothing says it.
True but for the wrong reason. The hardest kind to write and the best to discuss.

Put those four types on the board as a menu. The quality of what children produce goes up immediately, because "write an amber one" is otherwise a much vaguer instruction than it sounds.

Why is writing the statements harder than answering them?

Because to write a statement that is deliberately half-true, a child has to know precisely what the text says and precisely where it stops. That is a more demanding piece of comprehension than judging someone else's statement, and it is completely invisible in the finished sheet — which is why the writing half should get most of the lesson.

From the classroom

The first time I ran this the class wrote twelve statements between them and every one was obviously true or obviously false. What fixed it was a rule that felt mean and worked: a statement your partner gets right instantly does not count. They are trying to make their partner think, not to catch them out and not to be easy. Within one lesson they were writing ambers on purpose, and arguing about whether their own statement was fair — which is exactly the conversation you want.

How do you run it?

Model four statements on the board and let the class colour the lights, including at least two ambers.
Argue one of the ambers properly. Do not resolve it too quickly — some genuinely have no settled answer, and that is worth saying out loud.
Print the sheet and hand the writing over. Four statements each is plenty.
Swap, judge, then compare — the writer marks and has to defend their intended answer.
Take the best disputed statement to the whole class as the plenary.

Which year groups is it for?

Year 2 upwards. In Year 2 and 3, you write the statements and they only judge — the writing half is too hard, and green and red with one amber is enough. From Year 4 they write for a partner. In Years 5 and 6, require at least two ambers out of four and make them justify their intended answer with a line from the text; at that point it is a point, evidence, explain exercise wearing a disguise.

Try it now

Write four statements about today's chapter yourself — one true, one false, two amber — and let the class judge them. Then hand the writing over. The second half is where it stops being a quiz.