1. Activating Prior Knowledge (Schema)
1. Relating unfamiliar to their prior knowledge and/or personal experience –
those connections generally take three forms:
a. Text-to-self connections
i. What are your feelings about what you read?
ii. How is the text like or not like your own life? Explain.
iii. In what ways are you like any of the characters? Explain.
iv. Does the character or topic remind you of your friends or family?
v. What character in the text would you like to be? Why?
b. Text-to-text connections
i. In what way (s) does the text remind you of other things you have read?
ii. Discuss other works from the same genre.
iii. Compare what you are reading to other works by the same author.
iv. Does the author’s craft remind you of anything you have read before?
c. Text-to-world connections
i. What newspaper or magazine articles does this text remind you of?
Explain.
ii. Compare your text to a current or past event.
iii. Connect the text to something in your culture or the culture of someone
else.
iv. Does the text make you think of a famous person, place or thing? Explain.
2. To use what is known about an author and his or her style to predict and
better understand a text.
3. To identify potentially difficult or unfamiliar text structures or formats.
4. To recognize when they had inadequate background information and to
know how to build schema – to learn the information needed, before
reading.
Mosaic of Thought