List of Strategies to Promote Meaning in Your Instruction

- Meaning: Focuses on conceptual understanding, not just role learning. Help students build sophisticated understanding of the world and its people.

- Connect: Connect students’ prior experiences to content area.

- Many kinds of print: Connect students to different genres in print; include posters, recipes, student-generated work, letters and signs.

- Newspaper & current periodicals: Connect students with examples of what you are studying in periodicals and the world today.

- Technology: Connect students by accessing information from around the world through the Internet. Use video disks, Web-sites

o Ex. (Dyer Street Cool Links)

- Models: Use physical models to provide opportunities to study hard-to-reach phenomena such as atoms, planets, rockets or the human heart.

- Graphic organizers: Provide visual displays of your information to support auditory input. Use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast to provide meaning.

- Food: Try foods form different places or that illustrate different scientific or mathematical applications.

o Ex. pizza for fractions or to graph items on a slice of pizza

- Works of art: Reproductions of great works of art to set the stage for the study of concepts from the content area.

- Class Specialist: Assign a class specialist in art, music, writing, and poetry to perform or explain a concept from class. Students who are good at one subject will relate their specialty to the class theme of the week.

- Music: Find recording to support your study of history and culture.