Hi, My comment was to the fact that we cannot do anything about the fact that the child has never been to a farm. Of course, the next best thing is to use pictures, realia, but it will not give him the schema that the child who has been to a farm has. Like what the ground feels like in the barn, or how the doors are chewed up by the animals or how it smells. That's what I mean. The concrete experience of "farm" is the only one that will give him the schema I'm talking about. In preschool we even went as far a doing MOST of the activities for a holiday, AFTER the holiday so that the child had the recent schema for the books and activities. When kids are young, like 4, they might not have a good memory of the easter egg hunt they went to a year before. But the concrete is the first way we would want kids to learn about something, followed by recreations and the last way would be photographs. I didn't mean that we shouldn't try everything we could to get students to understand a concept if we couldn't take them to a farm. Debbie
ljackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I have to respectfully take exception to this. It rankles me from head to toe, and I know it was not meant to do so, so please do not take that personally. However, there is something you can do, there are lots of things you can do... Taking the example of a child who has never been to a farm... Find a short educational video about life on a farm. Read to them abut farm life. Find photographs and do a gallery walk--what do you notice? Invite someone to come talk to the kiddos about farming. Create a bit of a farm in the classroom (we created a barn out of appliance boxes and the hayloft opening became the theatre for puppet play. Use music about farms as shared reading. Find a class expert and encourage some talk. As an adult, there are lots of things I don't have strong schema for BUT part of teaching anyone about schema is letting them know that happens--and that it happens with proficient readers as well. Then we hand them some tools so that they can begin to accommodate, expand, develop their schema. Lori On 7/26/07 10:32 PM, "Debbie Goodis" wrote: > One of the unfortunate things about some populations of children is that > they DO NOT have background knowledge for many things and if > they do not, there is nothing you can do about it. -- Lori Jackson District Literacy Coach & Mentor Todd County School District Box 87 Mission SD 57555 http:www.tcsdk12.org ph. 605.856.2211 Literacies for All Summer Institute July 17-20. 2008 Tucson, Arizona _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. --------------------------------- Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search that gives answers, not web links. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
