ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Activating prior knowledge

The following is an idea for an activity to enhance text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections.

The activity uses the book The Whales' Song by Dyan Sheldon, but you could use any book you have in your classroom.

Before reading

During reading

Show the cover of the book The Whales' Song by Dyan Sheldon to the students.
Explain that good readers think about what they already know about a book before they read it to help them to understand the book better.
Ask students what they already know about the book just by looking at the cover and title (illustrated below).
Provide students with a KWL (know, want to know, learnt) chart (example below) and ask students to write what they already know about the book in the Know column. Encourage students to be as broad with this as possible and include any relevant knowledge they may have.
Flip slowly through the book or display pictures from the book on a smart board and encourage students to look closely at the pictures and write down any questions they have about the book in the Want to know column of their chart.

Read the book to the students, stopping periodically to ask if any of the questions they wrote down have been answered.
Allow students time to write the answers to their questions in the Learnt column of their table.

Sample KWL chart

After reading

After reading, encourage text-to-self connections by discussing how the book relates to the students, asking questions such as:

What did the book remind you of? For example: another book, an experience, a person...
Have you ever experienced anything similar to what happened in the book?
Which character in the book is most/least like you? Why?
Do you know anyone in your own life who is similar to the characters in the book?
Do you like this book? Why/why not

Encourage text-to-text connections by asking questions such as:

Have you read any books similar to this? How were they similar?
What similarities and differences does this book have to the last book you read?

The Whales' Song by Dyan Sheldon