Lesson Hook Models

Teacher provides preview/background/purpose for the lesson: to motivate, connect, provoke curiosity (3-5 minutes).

Before introducing new material to your students, question them to find out what they know about the subject. Then help them build the necessary schema through discussion.

Research:

• In fact, learning strategies that integrate prior knowledge with new learning have a strong influence, with an effect size of 0.93 (Hattie, 2018).

Schema (one of our Interdisciplinary Literacy Practices) implies that a person’s prior knowledge is essential in order for him or her to fully comprehend a concept.

There are four situations that are typically encountered when teaching a concept which requires use of schema. Let’s use the example of beginning readers to illustrate each one.

1. A student has the concept, but needs the label. (The student knows what an elephant is, but he needs help decoding the word.)

2. A student has the label, but needs the concept. (The student has phonetically worked out and correctly said the word “interview,” but she doesn't know the meaning of the word.)

3. A student has the label attached to the wrong concept, and the misconception must be corrected. (A student knows that the word “spring” means something that is wound up to power his toys, but is confused when the story mentions the deer sipping from the spring.)

4. A student has neither the concept, nor the label. (The student does not know the word or its meaning, and will need help to define the concept and attach it to the label.)

source: LINK

Examples of Activating Prior Knowledge:

• Word Study in Action: (LINK) At the beginning of this guided reading lesson, students are shown a non-fiction resource based on the theme of endangered species. They use their schema for this topic to predict vocabulary that may appear in the text. In the process, the teacher helps them to clarify the meaning of terms and to examine word structure.

  • Reference : Roe, B. D., Smith, S. H., & Burns, P. C. (2008). Teaching reading in today's elementary schools (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

• Science: LINK

• Start with a rebus! It helps get their brain engaged before you dive into the learning. Here are some links :

  • https://www.pinterest.com/do0089/rebus-puzzles/

  • http://fun-with-words.com/rebus_puzzle_explain.html

  • https://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/brainteasers/rebus-puzzles/index.htm

• Play a song that has lyrics that connect to what is to be learned and ask students to connect the lyrics to the learning target.

• Have someone in the community create a very short video about what they do in their job then ask students to choose from three different standards and determine which one applies to what was said.

• Show a picture of an object and ask students to identify it and what they notice. Connect this to the learning coming up. I.e. a chameleon has a pattern. What causes the pattern? Pattern would be part of the learning target.

• Present a problem or phenomenon and ask kids to give their best guess to one of the following questions: Why it is a problem, What is needed to solve it, What data would one need to solve it, who might be involved, etc.. You can tie their responses into the learning target.

• Post a strong statement and ask kids to “vote” (you can use Poll Everywhere) and then describe how what they learn today will help them answer with supporting evidence.

• Give the kids an interesting fact or statistic that they vote on if they believe it is true or not. Tell them what they learn today will give them the answer.

• Use a metaphor and ask students to explain what it means. Tell them they will learn how to use text based evidence to support their inferences.

Sample ways to "hook" students into the learning: