How important is accessing prior knowledge for students? (Baseball study) How do you immerse students in background knowledge or text sets to facilitate activation?
As the baseball study pointed out, “high prior knowledge about the content to be read facilitates the quantity and quality of recall”. It only makes sense that the more you know prior to reading a text would help to understand it more. To help students build background knowledge, I will sometimes show a short clip about the topic, help to build background vocabulary and assess their prior knowledge to know how in depth I have to go.
Multiple exposures are important for retention and independence. How will you offer these opportunities?
Being a resource room teacher, I provide many opportunities for retention and independence by doing the same skill multiple times during resource room times. Also, especially when it is an IEP goal, the need for multiple exposures allows me to assess if they have made progress towards their goal to meet the guidelines.
What strategies stuck out to you in this chapter and what ones and how will you bring them into your instruction?
Brain overload! Wow, there are a lot of great strategies in this chapter. As I was reading each strategy I was thinking about how I could use it in my classroom. A few of them would be difficult for my elementary students to understand, but so many of them would be useful. I find my students really struggle with any task where they have to discuss with other students. It is also difficult to use any of the strategies that do require them to discuss with other students when I have 2 to 3 students at a time in a group and they are struggling readers. They can’t be paired with more skilled readers. The strategies I think I could use in my classroom effectively are: KWL 2.0, Probable Passage, Possible Sentences, Word Splash, Think Aloud, Sketch to Stretch, Somebody Wanted But So, Retelling, The Three Big Questions, and Semantic Differential Scales. Most of these strategies would be discussed as a group and done together until I felt the students had a good grasp of the strategy to be able to complete on their own. Most of my students also struggle with writing, so it would be more stress on them to expect them to formulate their thoughts and get them on paper. Assisting them with the writing part would take that writing stress off them, since the purpose of the activity would be to access their understanding.