Practical Strategies for Building a Student's Background Knowledge

1. Create minilessons to build background knowledge on a topic before reading.
2. Include nonfiction texts from various cultures and ethnicities.
3. Use cognates when possible to help support content concepts. 
4. Encourage students to summarize their reading. 
5. Explicitly teach text features of informational text.
6. Use graphic organizers to enhance comprehension of nonfiction text.


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