Sample strategies to help learners build background knowledge and access important concepts and skills from my classes.
This PDF document includes focus questions to ask before, during, and after reading. I can use some of the pre-reading questions to activate student background knowledge and get them thinking about concepts. These questions help the teacher to understand how much the students already may know about the text.
This article elaborates on the 10 ways to build background knowledge (which you can see to the left). These strategies are helpful for making these discussions more interesting.
This YouTube playlist offers 15 simple background knowledge activation activities to use in the classroom. Every one of these activities is simple and easy to conduct. The variety in activities can help increase student engagement when activating prior knowledge.