Prior Knowledge - Inspiration
A great way to check your students' prior knowledge about National Parks is to use Inspiration or similar word mapping software on an interactive white board to create a word map. Students can make a diagram listing the names of places that they think are National Parks along with any other facts that they know about the National Park Service. When I did this activity with sixth graders, I discovered that students knew the names of very few of the parks and little information about them.
Later on during the unit, as students learn more about the parks, students could go back and correct and add additional information to the word map.
Below is a copy of the word map generated by 6th grade students prior to their study of the National Parks. (Note that they were assisted in naming some of the parks by posters that were hanging in the room.)
First published on Mar 10, 2009.
