Connections with prior knowledge may be one of my favorite parts of learning and teaching. As a student and as a teacher watching her students, finding ways to make meaningful connections to what we already know really seems like the best way to get excited about learning something new.
A few things I like to do...
1. KWL charts are a great tool for assessing and building background knowledge as the class shares our body of knowledge we already know as a group and develop questions to answer.
2. I like to whet everyone's appetite for a lesson with an image and ask kids if they can use the clues in the image and on the I CAN board to figure out what we might be discussing today. This worked really well when I introduced the probability unit in math. I created a Promethean page with a bunch of images connected with jobs that use probability/make predictions that students may have heard of. As we talked about what the images were, students began to understand what probability meant and where they had already seen it used.
3. The easiest thing to do is just a quick survey of "has anyone ever see/heard/read ____ before?" "What do we know about____?" "Who can tell me anything about____?" This is a nice way to get the discussion and energy going before introducing the lesson.
Your post contained plenty of evidence to support your claim that helping kids connect to prior knowledge is one of your favorite parts about teaching. The strategies you shared were all terrific--you may have noticed that Julie likes to use KWL charts, too--but I'd like to highlight one in particular. Using images to trigger kids' background knowledge is a smart way to bring visual literacy into your classroom. Reading a picture involves all the literacy skills necessary to read words on a page, but the extra cognitive load is an example of challenging kids to new ways of thinking. Children are naturally visual, and today's media & technology culture plays right into kids' strengths. We can build on that inclination by using images in productive, challenging ways to promote engagement, as you strategy shows. You might enjoy thinking of ways to use images as metaphors.
ReplyDeleteDo you remember in EDUC 7490 (I'm pretty sure I did this exercise with your class), you did a gallery walk around the room, looking at big photographs I'd posted of seemingly random images (women carrying water in baskets on their heads; Paris at night; a river; a close-up of an elderly woman's face; etc.). I wanted you to choose an image and use it to define your understanding of literacy. This kicked up the potential of visual literacy to encourage critical thinking. Just an idea . . .