-How important is accessing prior knowledge for students? (Baseball study) How do you immerse students in background knowledge or text sets to facilitate activation?
Assessing prior knowledge is so important for students to do prior to reading text. It was interesting to read in the baseball study how students that were poor readers but had high prior knowledge were able to understand the text just as well as students that were high skilled readers and had high prior knowledge. I liked how the author of the book said that all the ideas in chapter 7 give students a chance to talk, a chance to think about what they already know, a chance to activate prior knowledge. All of the strategies depend on student talk and student generated questions. Some students especially the less skilled readers will need extra support to learn to do this.
I have done the show and tell with my students before and I will try to have my students reflect more on what they know and talk with their peers about their knowledge. I have used the KWL chart and my students have had the same issues that the author discussed, using the
-Multiple exposures are important for retention and independence. How will you offer these opportunities?
Multiple exposures to text are important and I try to allow my students time to do repeat readings. Teaching students the importance of rereading is the first step because I know that they can have a negative attitude toward repeat readings of a text. Having audio texts would be very helpful with multiple exposures to a text.
-What strategies stuck out to you in this chapter and what ones and how will you bring them into your instruction?
Some of the strategies that stuck out to me in these chapters were: anticipation guides, KWL 2.0 chart, fix up anchor charts, sketch to stretch, somebody wanted but so, figure 8.10 and 8.11, three big questions and semantic differential scales. The students that I work with are struggling readers so all of these strategies would have to be done whole group for quite awhile until they could do them on their own, the writing part of some of these strategies would also cause my students difficulty and would be stressful for them.