Building the field
Who Lives Here?: Building Background Knowledge (http://www.youtube.com/watch?)v=_zRMNYJvfyg&list=PLE3506F7D457B31DD)
In the initial part of the Curriculum Cycle known as building the field, the teachers role is to find out what prior knowledge the students already have about the topic they are about to study. This allows the teacher to find the information that is missing and therefore required to be taught to the class. Students must have a substantial amount of background knowledge to write about the topic, hence the focus is on the content of the text (Gibbons, 2007). This stage involves a lot of
reading, listening and speaking skills as well as research |
skills. Activities to increase the knowledge of the topic could be: to read about the topic with the children; use pictures to teach vocabulary; create a word wall; jigsaw listening; research the topic through technology; barrier games; picture and sentence matching game (good for EALD students). For English as a second language (EAL) students, information could be collected in their mother tongue but they will need to share the information they have obtained with others in English. The above you tube clip illustrates this.
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