Building strong background knowledge is one of the six interACTIVE pieces we believe all educators should have when revising and refining their personal pedagogy. In today’s classroom, we as teachers use many different strategies to help students build background knowledge including discussions, videos, AR/VR and much more.
As primary educators, we like to integrate picture books into our units due to their accessible nature. They are short in length, easy to fit into almost any reading block, and they have an innate ability to help students build background knowledge. This is where the idea of interactive story boards were born!
In Kristin’s fourth grade classroom, when reading nonfiction, she has often incorporated the idea of Multimedia Text Sets developed by Lisa Highfill and the authors of the Hyperdoc Handbook. There is a wonderful article explaining how these Multimedia Text Sets differ from Hyperdocs that you can find here if you would like to learn more. These multimedia text sets are designed to give students the opportunity to explore content curated for a specific purpose. These sets give students more agency, while also approaching a topic with more of an inquiry-based method. It allows students to slow down and develop a sense of curiosity and background knowledge around a subject before diving into the content further.
Now, when using a picture book in the classroom, give students a chance to develop an understanding of the content and the message beyond just the pages of the book. With interactive story boards, students can learn more about the author, their message and see real world applications of the ideas they read about. In this blog we are going to share several interactive story boards we created to use with our own students, and give you the ability to download, edit and use again in your own specific learning environment!
Change Sings
Change Sings is the much-anticipated picture book by presidential inaugural poet and activist Amanda Gorman, anything is possible when our voices join together. As a young girl leads a cast of characters on a musical journey, they learn that they have the power to make changes—big or small—in the world, in their communities, and in most importantly, in themselves.
In the interactive story board above, students can watch her historical poetic introduction, learn more about the illustrator of the book, read poetry from other famous African American poets, and more! The template can be downloaded as a Google slide or PowerPoint presentation and all text and links are editable!
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-- Let us know if you’re using any of these ideas in your classroom! Be sure to follow us on social media (@TheMerrillsEDU everywhere) and tag us! 👓👗
For more tips, tricks and lesson ideas for making learning more interACTIVE, check out our books The InterACTIVE Class and Flipgrid in the InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
