Summer Suggestions
Summer is a perfect time to build experiences and background for your child. Background knowledge related to specific topics and personal experiences really makes your child a stronger reader!
Background knowledge is also called prior knowledge, or schema. All of these terms basically represent the information, insight, and experience you bring to a text. For example, if your child is reading about an animal that is only found in the rainforest, he/she needs to know a bit about the rainforest to really understand what that animal's life is like.
Ways to Build Background Knowledge
Into Summer
Providing experiences of the summer which broaden your child's knowledge of the world is one fantastic way to encourage summer learning. Here are some suggestions for incorporating an experience into reading and writing and reminders of what your child might learn from the task.
- Before leaving on a vacation, let your child browse pamphlets, brochures, and other materials about things to do in the location, history of a place, etc. Background Knowledge: How we prepare for a trip, types of experiences in a location, how information is presented in pamphlets and brochures, geography....
- Point out photographs, the text below photographs explaining the image (captions), maps, charts, and other ways the information is presented. Share what you learn from these charts, diagrams, etc.
- Look at the headings of each section, such as "Places to See" or "Best Restaurants" if you are going to a new town. Ask your child what type of information you can expect to learn in that section.
- Encourage your child to draft up a "dream" itinerary for a trip. The catch? He/she has to use real information from either brochures or online. Background Knowledge: How schedules work, understanding duration of events, general costs of fun events, various activities in a different place....
- Take that further by asking an older child to create a budget. This would be great for an amusement park, where your child has to make decisions on a particular food to eat or special pass based on the budget.
- Encourage your child to write a letter convincing you to support a particular activity on a trip. This is persuasive writing, where clear reasons support a claim or main opinion.
- Take advantage of the many free things in a city! Background Knowledge: Talents of people in our city, events we never knew existed, new interests, different aspects of art, dance, culture, sports....
- If you go to a farmer's market, talk to the farmers/sellers with your child and ask questions about their business. This simple conversation provides your child with new information about a job and where food comes from. In future reading, your child can use this knowledge to support comprehension.
- Find a park you have never visited. Talk about what you are seeing as you walk. Even if you're doing most of the talking, your child is hearing new vocabulary. Specifically, you are introducing new descriptive words into your child's vocabulary.
- Find an event that your family has never tried before, and commit to doing it once over the summer. For example, there are museum gallery crawls, astronomer star parties, outdoor concerts and other community events. Taking your family outside of their comfort zone is a perfect way to give your child new background knowledge about a completely new topic.
Background Knowledge: If you visit a new place, such as the Pittsburgh Aviary, your child will walk away with new information about birds, veterinarians, other professions with animals, climate, food sources, biodiversity in our world, etc.