Teaching your child through experiences helps support reading development in that it helps build a child’s background knowledge. Reading doesn’t always have to involve reading a book or having your child read a book to you. Background knowledge includes the following: children’s memories about themselves, others, objects and the world around them and values and expectations for behavior developed in different environments.
Building background knowledge is crucial to reading comprehension in that it helps a child make connections with the characters in a story, supports vocabulary development and builds a deeper understanding of a book’s main themes. Having background knowledge on a topic can also help children use context clues to sound out tricky words quickly when they are reading. Children’s experiences with their families and communities help develop their background knowledge.
Since we just celebrated the Fourth of July, I thought that I would tell you about a recent trip to the Boston Tea Party ship in Boston, Massachusetts. My husband loves history and has been teaching Tim about the American Revolution. We recently visited Lexington and Concord and took a tour of the Boston Tea Party Ship and Tim loved it. My husband had discussed the tax on tea and the colonists, so Tim already knew some information about the Boston Tea Party before we arrived.
At the beginning of the tour we were each given a card with the name and description of a colonist who we were supposed to pretend to be. The tour guides were dressed in period clothing, and “Samuel Adams” led the meeting about the new tax on tea. Through role playing on the tour, we learned more about why the colonists threw the tea overboard, and why they wanted to break away from England and form their own government. Tim was able to ask some excellent questions because my husband had already taught him about the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. Tim enjoyed throwing the tea overboard too!
The following books are several books that we have read aloud to Tim as a follow up to our visit to the Boston Tea Party ships.
Here are some ideas to support background knowledge and reading development through experiences:
• Have fun spending time traveling with your child and learning about new places. You can enjoy learning along with your child or you can teach your child if the place is a place you have a lot of knowledge about. Make sure the experience is something you are interested in too, as if you are excited about the experience, your child most likely will be too!• Support your child in asking questions about the new experience. If you are at a museum or other location with available staff, be sure to engage them in discussion or ask them questions. They are often very knowledgeable and happy to answer questions that you have.
• Discuss the new experience before going and after going to talk about what your child learned, his or her favorite part, something your child would like to learn more about. It might be helpful for you to read up on the place you are going beforehand so that you can teach your child some information about it in advance.
• If you didn’t get to experience everything, plan a follow up trip or see what other activities or programs are offered.
• Experiences can be free! A walk outside talking about the flowers, insects, wildlife and other things you see on your walk is free, fun and supports reading development!
• Follow up by checking out a variety of books on your experience. For example, if you visited an aquarium, check out books about sea life that you saw or read stories about visits to the aquarium.
• Some suggestions of experiences include: historical monuments, national parks, museums, farms, beach trips, camping etc. Possibilities are endles
Terrific post and great ideas!