When my son was four, he heard someone say, “You can’t eat rocks.”
Indignantly, he turned to me and said, “Unless you’re a dinosaur eating gastroliths."
I had never heard the word gastrolith. But my son was always picking up new facts from his Yoto cards, so I asked him to tell me more.
After a long explanation from him and a quick Google search from me, I learned that he was right. Some dinosaurs swallowed rocks. These rocks, called gastroliths, may have helped them break down food in their digestive systems.
It was a small fact. A strange word mentioned in an audiobook and remembered by a four-year-old.
But it did not stay small.
Later, when my son began learning about animals and their digestive systems, he already had somewhere to place the new information. He knew that animals did not all process food in the same way. He knew about gastroliths. When he learned that some animals have multiple chambers in their stomachs and that different animals use different techniques to break down food, the information stuck quickly.
I became fascinated by this idea.
Knowing even a little about something can make it much easier to understand and remember more.
Background knowledge supports reading comprehension by helping children connect new words and ideas to information already stored in their memories. The more connections they can make, the easier new information becomes to understand and remember.
How background knowledge affects reading comprehension
A widely cited study from the wonderful year of 1988 helps demonstrate this effect.
Researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie divided seventh- and eighth-grade students according to two factors: their general reading ability and how much they knew about baseball. (Thank God I wasn’t in this study.)
The students then read a passage describing part of a baseball game.
It turns out that knowledge of baseball had a tremendous effect on comprehension. Students who had been classified as weaker readers but knew a lot about baseball understood and remembered the passage better than stronger readers who knew very little about the game.
One of my favorite authors, Daniel T. Willingham, has used the study to explain why knowledge changes what happens while we read. A reader who understands baseball can recognize that a sequence of individual actions describes a double play. The reader does not have to hold every throw, player and movement separately in working memory. Prior knowledge allows all those details to become one meaningful idea.
The study does not mean that decoding ability is unimportant. Instead, it demonstrates that reading the words and understanding the ideas are not the same thing.
The two parts of skilled reading: decoding and language comprehension
I already understood the importance of decoding.
As a reading teacher, I knew children needed explicit instruction in how written language works. Then, during my Orton-Gillingham training, I learned that English is much more regular and rule-based than I had ever realized.
Children do not need to memorize every word or guess based on a picture. They can learn the rules that govern our language. They can connect letters with sounds, blend those sounds together and recognize the patterns that make unfamiliar words readable.
Having worked in schools with extremely different student populations, I had also observed firsthand that children who had been exposed to many different places, subjects, books and conversations often understood what they read more easily than peers with more limited experiences.
Understanding just how much prior knowledge shapes reading comprehension solidified the importance of the other side of reading for me.
Skilled reading depends on both decoding and language comprehension.
Decoding gives children access to the words. Language comprehension allows them to make sense of those words.
Language comprehension includes vocabulary, oral language, knowledge of sentence structures and knowledge about the world. Every text assumes that the reader already knows something. Authors cannot stop to explain every idea, relationship or implied event.
A child may be able to decode the word hatchling. But understanding a passage about a sea turtle nest is easier if the child already knows that turtles lay eggs in the sand, and that those eggs eventually hatch, scurry across the sand at night, and make their way to the sea.
The more children know, the more connections they can make. Each connection gives new information somewhere to hold onto.
When beginning to build Nahlo, these were the two truths I wanted to hold. The Nahlo Magazine is designed to carefully progress a child through a structured sequence of skills that would allow them to decode a large number of words successfully and sequentially. On the flip side, the Travel Log would foster deeper experiential knowledge.
Phonics makes the text readable. Rich experiences give children opportunities to expand their minds.
Why experiences do not automatically build knowledge
This could make it sound as though children simply need to visit more places.
Take them to the museum. Walk through the nature center. Visit the beach. Check the experience off the list.
But being somewhere is not the same as learning from it.
I have taken my kids to a museum only to watch them run through every exhibit.
During one visit to Liberty Science Center, there was an incredible traveling exhibit about Pixar. It offered a look inside the science, art and technology behind movies they already knew. My kids looked at a few pictures and were ready to go.
They were surrounded by amazing things, but they needed an entry point. A process for engaging with everything before them.
The experience alone could not do that for them.
To build knowledge, children need opportunities to slow down, to zoom in, to notice what is actually in front of them. They need to ask questions, hear new words and connect what they are seeing to something they already know.
Then they need to return to the experience over time.
How writing helps children remember what they learn
This is where writing becomes important.
Children need to be exposed to a wide range of information, but they also need ways to process that information and store it in their memories.
Writing asks a child to retrieve what happened. It asks them to select a detail, put events in order, explain a relationship or find the words to describe what they noticed.
A child who writes that a fiddler crab has one claw much larger than the other must look carefully enough to notice the difference. Later, when that child returns to the page, the observation brings the experience back.
A child who explains what happened first, next and finally is doing more than recording a trip. The child is organizing the experience into a structure that can be remembered and communicated.
This is also an important idea in one of my favorite writing resources: The Writing Revolution. Children need knowledge to have something meaningful to write about. Writing then requires them to think about that knowledge, organize it and express it clearly.
Information gives children something to say. Writing helps them make sense of it and makes it stick.
Why we made the Nahlo Travel Log
I did not want children to return from a trip with only a list of places they had visited.
I wanted them to notice something.
The Nahlo Travel Log helps children prepare for an experience, pay attention while they are there and return to it afterward. Its prompts give children enough structure to begin but plenty of flexibility to make it theirs.
They can record what happened.
They can draw something they noticed.
They can capture a new fact, an unfamiliar word or a question they still have.
They can add photographs, tickets, maps, stickers and the thousand little pieces of paper kids somehow collect during every outing.
Sometimes they use it in ways we never anticipated. During a visit to Kennedy Space Center, my children turned their Travel Logs into autograph books when they met astronaut Ken Cameron. Each page became a tangible record of an encounter that was meaningful to them.
The Travel Log does not attempt to manufacture wonder or tell children exactly what they should remember. It gives them tools to slow down, pay attention and preserve the things that mattered.
Then, when they encounter a related idea in a book, conversation or future experience, they are not beginning from nothing.
They already know a little.
And sometimes, knowing a little is exactly what allows a child to learn a lot more.
Read. Explore. Notice. Write. Repeat.
Brittany Spatz is a former classroom reading and English teacher, Orton-Gillingham practitioner, parent, and founder of Nahlo, a children’s literacy and exploration brand.