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Activating Prior Knowledge - Helping students do it independently!

1/21/2014

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Activating prior knowledge is a common educational phrase. Almost any teacher will tell you the importance of getting students to make connections to their background knowledge before they learn about a new topic or read a new story. 

Recently I searched for ideas on how to activate prior knowledge. Everything I found included the teacher doing the activating of the students - an external event, rather than students learning how to activate their own brains.
We need our students to be able to do this independently! During standardized assessments, teachers are not able to prompt students with questions, KWL charts, and other hints about the topic. During most authentic learning situations, I don't have someone saying to me "What do you Know about this topic?"

So how does one activate one's own knowledge? What do you do when faced with a topic you know little about? I reflected on my own experience and then developed a tool to help my students. The
Prior Knowledge Spinner provides 6 questions to stimulate metacognition, particularly as it relates to prior knowledge.  I provided students with the topic, then had them spin and answer the questions. 

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I also created a second version with visual prompts to help our English Learners or other students who needed some additional support. 


Our goal is to have students use the spinners frequently enough that the questions become embedded in their metacognitive processes. This  will include a transition phase when we fade out the actual spinners and encourage a visualization.

Interested in these tools? Email me a request at anne@ideasforeducators.com and I will be happy to send them to you. 

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100% Participation with TodaysMeet

1/9/2014

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100% participation - always an instructional goal of mine - happened today thanks to TodaysMeet.com. TodaysMeet allows anyone to set up a temporary chat room (free!) where students can share their ideas and questions with each other. Quick and easy to set up, and just as quick and easy to join in, a teacher could decide to use this website without any advance preparation.

Today I used the site to have students share sentences that included our social studies vocabulary terms in a variety of contexts. Our current unit is on economics, so terms included incentives, opportunity cost, etc. The photo shows a screenshot of some of their entries.

Some students quickly entered their sentences. This allowed others to see examples that sparked their thinking. Because all of the students knew that their work would be visible, they were a bit more motivated to check their spelling and grammar (although still not perfect!) As a group, we went through the sentences and discussed which worked and which needed tweaking, making sure that everyone really understood the terms.

Warning - to join a classroom, all you must do is enter a name. This means that a student could choose to enter a fictitious name and type inappropriate comments. Be sure to review appropriate use guidelines before you begin.

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Fantastic Fraction Accommodation

1/7/2014

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Students often struggle with trying to find common denominators when adding or subtracting fractions. Carol Gillis, a special education teacher in Webster, NY, developed this creative accommodation to assist students. 

  1. Make two copies of a multiplication chart - one on blue paper and one on green.
  2. Laminate the charts and then cut them into strips as shown in the photo. 
  3. Paste the outer row/column to a piece of laminated card stock. 
  4. Apply a strip of sticy-backed velcro to the center back of each chart, and the corresponding velcro strip to the laminated piece of card stock. 
  5. When students are working with uncommon denominators, they pull the two strips off the chart,  and line up the strips to see the common number. (See example above on right.) Then they can count over to determine the correct number needed to multiply the fraction to find the equivalent.


Thanks for sharing, Carol!

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    Anne M. Beninghof

    Anne's mission is to improve instruction through collaboration and the sharing of creative, practical ideas for educators.

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