Test your understanding of the Prior Knowledge metacognitive reading strategy
Learning Objectives:
Introduction:
Metacognitive reading strategies help you become a stronger reader by being self-aware of your goals and how you practice them. The first strategy is called "Activating Your Prior Knowledge."
Is what you already know about your book. This is probably more than you think! You can start with a few prompts like these:
Pre-Reading:
The process of looking ahead towards what you'll be reading is called pre-reading. The goal of this strategy is to help you comprehend new information by considering things you already know about the topic or text. Connecting the reading with your prior knowledge and experience accounts for a lot of the comprehension process.
Research:
Always try to find out what you can about your book before reading it. You can look into:
Reflection:
Once you've researched your book, it's important to reflect on how it connects with your prior knowledge.
Curiosity:
The last step is to activate your curiosity. When we learn, it's through practice, and it's driven by curiosity. Ask yourself questions about your reading:
At noon of that same day in the first week of August, Winnie Foster sat on the bristly grass just inside the fence and said to the large toad who was squatting a few yards away across the road, "I will, though. You'll see. Maybe even first thing tomorrow, while everyone's still asleep."
It was hard to know whether the toad was listening or not. Certainly, Winnie had given it good reason to ignore her. She had come out to the fence, very cross, very near the boiling point on a day that was itself near to boiling, and had noticed the toad at once. It was the only living thing in sight except for a stationary cloud of hysterical gnats suspended in the heat above the road. Winnie had found some pebbles at the base of the fence and, for lack of any other way to show how she felt, had flung one at the toad. It missed altogether, as she'd fully intended it should, but she made a game of it anyway, tossing pebbles at such an angle that they passed through the gnat cloud on their way to the toad. The gnats were too frantic to notice these intrusions, however, and since every pebble missed its final mark, the toad continued to squat and grimace without so much as a twitch. Possibly it felt resentful. Or perhaps it was only asleep. In either case, it gave her not a glance when at last she ran out of pebbles and sat down to tell it her troubles.
"Look here, toad," she said, thrusting her arms through the bars of the fence and plucking at the weeds on the other side. "I don't think I can stand it much longer."
At this moment a window at the front of the cottage was flung open and a thin voice—her grandmother's—piped, "Winifred! Don't sit on that dirty grass. You'll stain your boots and stockings."