How important is accessing prior knowledge for students? (Baseball study) How do you immerse students in background knowledge or text sets to facilitate activation?
I think that background knowledge is extremely important. I believe that this is one of the biggest challenges in our district when creating skillful readers. Our students come to us with limited background knowledge. I liked many of the strategies that were listed in chapter 7. As a former science teacher, I have used anticipation guides in the past. Although, I think if I would have changed the statements in the participation guide it would have facilitated more discussion and led to a greater development of background knowledge.
-Multiple exposures are important for retention and independence. How will you offer these opportunities?
One of the things that we have focused on this year is offering reading strategies to help our students read and understand texts. We have focused on explicitly teaching students at the middle school reading strategies that they can use to clarify meaning and extend understanding. I would like to continue offering teachers reading strategies that they can use in their content classrooms to help students better understand texts.
-What strategies stuck out to you in this chapter and what ones and how will you bring them into your instruction?
I love the three big questions strategy. I think that I could have used this strategy in my science classroom. I really like the way this strategy can be used to generate conversation and provide struggling readers with the opportunity to generate background knowledge.