 As her grade five class at Spring Bank Middle School gets ready for their upcoming unit on Patterns and Algebra, Sue uses an anticipation guide to check for prior knowledge and ignite student curiosity. An anticipation guide introduces a new concept or topic to your students. You can take those concepts or topics from the learner outcomes and the key intentions that you want to get the kids to know, so using the vocabulary or specific big ideas. As a strategy to activate prior knowledge, anticipation guides lead students to predict and infer about new ideas. Kids will go through it and I guess it confirms for me the kids that know it. I'm looking to see which kids think they're false and what they're thinking is, and I'm also looking for the kids that leave it blank that have no idea. So do they have no idea because they don't understand the vocabulary or do they have no idea because the math is too difficult or they can't put it into words? They help kind out what she needs to teach us, like she doesn't have to teach us pointless things that we already know. It gave me a really good understanding of words that we don't know and words that we know. Anticipation guides are great for activating prior knowledge, building confidence when learning new concepts and helping students think like experts in their discipline. At the end she kind of like said like, you have your questions about the words, she kind of like tried to explain to without like giving them the answer. And like after every question she would give us some time to think about it and maybe give us a hint. We've learned this word in science or we've done it in experiment. She tried to help us succeed. So when I was planning this anticipation guide I really thought a lot about the language that the kids are going to have to be using through the unit. So what words do they need to know to be successful? I was really happy that one of the kids gave me a prompt and asked can I draw a picture because I usually tell them that at the beginning with explaining their thinking. Words, pictures are fine and numbers they can use any or all of the above so I needed that prompt back. But yeah I'm just looking to see where is my focus going to have to be for the rest of the unit. I used to think algebra was just a bunch of numbers and letters but now I realize it's a little different but yeah I feel a little bit easier now because I kind of started it. I kind of feel like a B now. I was kind of worried. I was going like what is B plus 125. I think that they have that oh I actually do know something and there's always a kid that says I know absolutely nothing and I say that's okay because we haven't learned it yet. So there's you still have that. You're not expected to know everything coming in. It's a really good boost in my house. It feels like you don't get nervous before you're like I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do. It's kind of like helping work into it slowly get used to it. Their confidence I think that they like knowing what's coming. Kids like knowing their intentions, they like having it spelled out for them, they like to know what their day is going to look like. They don't like surprises. It kind of like helps you get a feel for it so it isn't that so it doesn't feel like a whole new thing to you.