Using visualization to enhance background knowledge

the long version

When students have little or no background knowledge about a topic, it's tough for them to understand what you're trying to teach. But a great way to overcome this lack of background knowledge is to use visualization strategies. Award-winning teacher Jennifer Morrison demonstrates how to use several strategies in a language arts unit on Native Americans. See how incorporating graphical representation as a pre-reading strategy helps students to increase their background knowledge and comprehension of new subject matter. And see how symbolic representations of text used as a during-reading activity can help individual students access relevant background knowledge about a topic.