Quote: "Teachers use prereading activities to build students' background knowledge; first they determine whether students need world or literary knowledge and then provide experiences and information to develop their schema. They use a combination of experiences, visual representations, and talk to build knowledge. Involving students in authentic experiences such as taking fieldtrips, participating in dramatizations, and examining artifacts is the best way to build background knowledge but photos and pictures, picture books, websites, videos, and other visual representations can also be used. Talk is often the least effective way, especially for English learners, but sometimes explaining a concept or listing the characteristics of a genre does provide enough information." (P. 260)
Comment: If Zimmerman and Hutchins say that, "the meaning you get from a piece is intertwined with the meaning you bring to it"(p. 261) then activating that background knowledge is an important aspect of making children better readers.Teachers can help by providing experiences that create background knowledge such as fieldtrips and they can also help activate prior background knowledge by asking questions that will bring them to memory.
Question: What is a way that you could see yourself building students' backgroung knowledge?
I believe children begin to develop their background knowledge long before they enter school. There interactions with parents and other caregivers help to establish what they think about the world and the things in it, including reading, school and studying. I also believe the children who are read to about a lot of different subjects, and who are engaged in conversation on a regular basis, about a lot of different topics, tend to have higher background knowledge. A teacher should recognize the background knowledge her students have and help it grow.
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