Knowledge Building in the Classroom

I talk a lot about decoding skills on the blog, like building phonological awareness skills and phonics knowledge; however, vocabulary instruction and knowledge building in the classroom is critical if we want students to be literate. Both sides of Scarborough’s Reading Rope need to be taught simultaneously.

Knowledge building is so important in the classroom, and I wanted to take some time during this back to school season and talk about how we can do just that. I am so excited because my friend, Meghan, from @alwaysmoretolearn wrote a blog post all about how she does just that in her second grade classroom. Meghan is FULL of great ideas and I hope when you finish reading this blog you feel empowered and ready to tackle knowledge building in your classroom!

Knowledge Building by Meghan Hein, @alwaysmoretolearn

I read this quote (picture above) by Natalie Wexler in her book, The Knowledge Gap (HHFF Affiliate Amazon Link), last school year. After a year-long quest to deepen my understanding of the Word Recognition part of Hollis Scarborough’s reading rope, I started to ask questions about the part I wasn’t hearing as much about yet on my Instagram feed, Language Comprehension. Thanks to so many educators like Megan, I felt I had a stronger grasp on things like Phonological Awareness, Decoding, and Sight Recognition but wanted to feel the same level of confidence when approaching other areas like Background Knowledge and Vocabulary with the ultimate goal of having my students comprehend the texts in front of them. 

It’s been a journey of learning. One, I am still getting started with. Today I am excited to share six tips that got the ball rolling for me and have also positively resulted in making teaching way more fun for me and my learners! 

The key is the content! When we elevate the content and think about what KNOWLEDGE we want students to take away from a unit of learning, it changes the way we think about their experiences within the school day. This is where we begin. 

Step One: Pick your Content

In my school district, we have an adopted ELA/ELD curriculum that has set themes related to science and social studies making the task much easier for me. But even if you don’t, your Science and Social Studies/History standards are a great place to begin! For the last decade or more, our adopted science and social studies textbooks had been locked in our grade level storage room. That is no longer the case! Dust those off and have a peek at what science and social studies topics your students are supposed to be learning about within your grade level. Now carve out some time in your year-long scope and sequence to really dive into those selected themes. In my class, we will be working on the theme of government in the first four weeks of school. 

Step Two: Grab your Resources

The first thing I typically do when I am beginning a new Knowledge Building theme is jump onto youTube. My most recent search was, “government video for second grade.” You’ll be amazed at the offerings and how watching a short 5 minute video will help YOU to grasp a summary of the content you want to convey throughout the unit. I start to link good videos to a document that I can refer back to. (Warning: Make sure you watch them all the way through before sharing with your class). 

Once I have videos, I usually search Google for something like “read alouds about government for children) and start looking through offerings of books I can check out from the library, purchase myself, or even better, find an online read aloud via Youtube. 

Step Three: Choose your Vocabulary

This step is dependent upon both the theme and the texts you will be reading together as a class. I try to select academic words from our texts that would be considered “TIER 2” words. These are words that occur more frequently in speech and text and that students might find across academic domains.

 I just read through one of our texts from our unit and pulled out these words: “country, local, citizens, and govern.” Sure, students will be exposed to TIER 3 words like “Legislative and Judicial” too,  but these words don’t have quite as high utility as the TIER 2 words selected. 

Targeted words will be taught explicitly. I will name the word, give students an example of the word in context, have students predict the definition based on their own schema of the word, and finally define the word and attach it to a visual image that I find and print. 

After it’s been taught, that word becomes our “signal word” of the day. In order to get students’ attention throughout the day, I will say “Local!” Students can respond saying, “An adjective that describes the area you live in.” You can also incentivize students’ usage of these target words throughout the unit so that they continue to become a part of their general lexicon. 

Step Four: Pictorials, Poems, Chants, and Songs

This is where your creativity comes in and the learning fun begins! Have you heard of a pictorial before? A pictorial is basically a pencil drawn poster filled with content that you outline with markers in front of your students while orally front loading them with academic content. Key vocabulary is labeled, additional images (found on google) to accompany the topics are printed and placed on the pictorial and students can refer back to this one poster FILLED with information all throughout the unit. For our unit, I will create a pictorial that outlines the three branches of our government. This pictorial should give my students a better foundation to understand the texts they’ll read throughout the unit. 

Poetry, Chants, and Songs give you so much bang for your buck, so to speak. Last year, I took it upon myself to write new lyrics to popular songs all about our content themes. I am STILL getting messages from parents that their children are singing those songs to themselves in the car and even in the shower over summer break! The best part, the academic vocabulary you place in a poem, chant, or song will inevitably find its way into your students’ oral discourse and even their writing! You have to trust me on this one. It’s an amazing byproduct! 

Recite these songs, chants, or poems during transitions throughout the school day, as you’re walking to lunch, on the way back to class after recess and it will cement their learning like no other!

Step Five: Connect your Writing to the Content

Once students have been flooded with texts, videos, and vocabulary about your theme, they will have no problem sharing their learning with a related writing prompt. Your walls will soon be covered with rich academic language that will guide them in drafting what they want to convey through writing. For our unit we will be diving specifically into laws: how they’re made, why they’re important etc. This gives us headway to write an opinion piece about whether or not a particular law is beneficial. Or, students can write an informative piece about how the three branches of government work together to create new laws. The possibilities are endless! Just make sure that students have ample knowledge to support their brainstorming and drafting process. 

Step Six: Empower your Budding Experts

Last year, I created book boxes that sat on each table group that we called our “Expert Bins.” I dismantled the guided reading texts that accompanied our curriculum offerings and placed one copy of each title in the bins. I scoured the books no longer being used in our intervention room for related books sets and even got books from the library to add to our expert bins as well. I have never seen my students so motivated to read independently! They now had a variety of levels of text at their fingertips that all supported their knowledge building of our theme! 

You can even create personal libraries online with a TON of book offerings too, using free online websites like Epic!

And there you have it, friends. Your start to strengthening that other side of the reading rope. Once you begin, the sky’s the limit. What art can you make to accompany the theme? What experiments will enhance your science content? What enrichment project can students create to present to their classmates or even school peers? Knowledge Building is SO much fun and serves as an amazing foundation for reading comprehension!