We use background knowledge to help us infer meaning. When a child approaches a text, he brings what he knows to figure out what he doesn't know. Daniel T. Willingham, cognitive scientist and author of Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (2009), states that writers leave gaps for readers to fill in" (Taberski, 2011, p. 155).
Having background knowledge and making connections to text is so essential for young learners. Barbara Moss in Exploring the Literature of Fact: Children’s Nonfiction Trade Books in the Elementary Classroom (2002) says, “Nothing is of more importance to students’ understanding of text than the knowledge they already have about a topic. This knowledge serves as a foundation for all future learning and provides the “hooks” on which students can hang their new learning about a topic” (p. 92) (Taberski, 2011, p.147). The students will bring their own understanding into everything that they read, for young learners their background knowledge will not be as vast as older learners and that is where scaffolding is so important.
The lessons I have provided are mainly focused on building and extending background knowledge using a variety of different strategies and text. Tracey and Morrow (2017) write that “people have schemata for everything in their lives including people, places, things, language, processes, and skills.” I tried to write my lessons so that every student would have an initial schemata or background knowledge before beginning the lessons. The first lesson "Family Ties" and the second lesson "Digging Deeper" were created using the resource ReadWriteThink.org. These lessons focus mainly on building and extending students background knowledge. The last lesson, "Companion Texts for Classics" was developed using a Scholastic resources as well as the Taberski text.
For each lesson, there is an extension for those students that have been successful with the concepts and are ready to move on and extend their learning. Taberski says on page 150 that, “The more you know, the more you understand. The more you understand, the more you read. And the more you read, the more you know.” The extension have many different strategies that many learners are successful.
For each lesson, I also included an accommodation/modification for the struggling readers as well as the bi/multilingual students. Tracey and Morrow (2017) talk about the Schema Theory that, "the theory also suggests that without existing schemata it is very hard to learn new information on a topic" and "knowledge structures are pliant and expandable" (p. 60). This suggests the importance of developing schema in young children and helping them expand their schema. I tried to include accommodations and modifications that would benefit a wide-range of learners.
