Learning Principles in Action: Learning Doesn't Start From Scratch—Understanding Prior Knowledge & Experience and 6 Ways to Support It at Home

When a student walks into a classroom, learning doesn't start from zero. Every student brings something with them: knowledge from previous lessons, experiences from home and the world around them, things they are curious about, and perspectives shaped by who they are.

At Graded, teachers use these starting points to help students connect new learning to what they already know and understand. This is the idea behind Prior Knowledge & Experience (PKE), one of Graded's six Learning Principles.

“Our students come to school with a wide breadth of experiences and knowledge. It is vital to engage students by understanding what they already know and understand,” said Bobbi Netzel, Graded’s Director of Teaching and Learning. “If we don’t begin with where students are, we risk wasting valuable instructional time and creating learning experiences that are either too easy, too difficult, or simply disconnected from what students need next.”

While the principle remains consistent across Graded, what it looks like changes as students develop. Young students may connect a new concept to something familiar from home or school. Middle School students may use questions to challenge an assumption or revise an idea. In High School, students increasingly draw on years of academic knowledge and personal experience to analyze complex ideas, examine context, and develop their own perspectives.
 
The idea is simple: learning doesn't start from scratch. It starts with what students bring and grows from there.
 

LOWER SCHOOL: FINDING THE STARTING POINT

In Lower School, PKE begins with the understanding that even the youngest learners arrive with knowledge, experiences, and ideas that can become starting points for learning. Because students in the same class may have very different experiences and levels of understanding, teachers continually consider where each student is on their learning journey. Through observation, conversation, classroom interactions, and intentional activities, teachers uncover students’ thinking and use it to shape what happens next.

The ways teachers do this evolve as students grow. With younger children, observation and documentation are especially important. With older students, teachers can use more explicit routines and activities to make thinking visible, such as asking them to explain a concept in their own words, create a visual representation, or explore connections between ideas. Across grade levels, these strategies do more than reveal what students already know. They activate prior experiences, spark curiosity, and help teachers determine how to move learning forward.

Making Thinking Visible in Grade 1

For Grade 1 teacher Camila Alves, documentation is key to understanding and building on students’ PKE. Because young children are still developing their reading and writing skills, she relies on conversations, observations, drawings, and photographs to capture what they already know, have experienced, and wonder about. For example, to kick off the school year, students share photos of their families, bringing their cultures and experiences into the classroom.
 
During a study of living things, students are introduced to mealworms and asked what they think will happen to them and what they need to grow. They then draw their own imagined life cycle, creating a record of their initial thinking that they can revisit and compare with what actually happens. As students revisit their initial ideas, they notice how their thinking changes and make connections between what they already knew and what they are learning.

Camila also uses open-ended questions such as “What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder?” Students have opportunities to turn and talk, allowing them to hear and build on one another’s ideas. Together, these practices give Camila a fuller picture of each child and help her decide when to work with the whole class and when to provide different levels of support or challenge in smaller groups. 

 

 

Making Connections in Grade 3

By Grade 3, students can take a more active role in making their prior knowledge visible. Teacher Vanessa Takamura uses strategies such as “See, Think, Wonder,” concept maps, and Frayer Models to uncover students' understanding of key concepts.
 
During a unit on inventions, she showed students photographs of pagers, cassette tapes, telegraphs, and answering machines and asked, “What do you think it is?” and “What is it for?” Their surprising responses revealed how unfamiliar some once-common technologies were to them and opened the door to further discussion and exploration.
 
In another unit on identity and culture, students create a “Me in a Shoebox” collection by bringing in five objects or photographs that represent who they are, their culture, the communities they belong to, or things they value. These activities not only give students opportunities to draw on their own experiences but also help Vanessa determine how deeply the class needs to explore a concept. If students demonstrate a strong understanding, the class can move forward. If their knowledge is more superficial, she knows they need additional exploration and research.

In Lower School, PKE is therefore an ongoing part of teaching rather than a one-time check of what students know. What teachers learn about their students informs planning, differentiation, and the questions they ask next.

 

 

MIDDLE SCHOOL: BUILDING THE BRIDGE

In Middle School, teachers intentionally help students identify and activate what they already know before introducing new learning. This might involve asking students what they notice and wonder about a new subject, connecting a topic to broader concepts or experiences, or prompting them to consider how the learning relates to their own lives. These routines help students recognize what feels familiar and what is new, while giving them a foundation for connecting and organizing new information. 

Although students still benefit from explicit prompting and instruction, the goal is to gradually build their independence so they become more accustomed to asking questions, making connections, and recognizing how previous knowledge and experiences can support new learning.

Building on Previous Learning in Math

In Middle School math, this process is particularly visible through the intentional spiraling of the curriculum. 

Middle School Mathematics Teacher Kristin Nugent regularly begins lessons with warm-up questions that revisit previously learned skills and connect them to the day’s new learning. Before introducing two-dimensional geometric transformations in Grade 8, students revisit how to plot an ordered pair on a coordinate plane—a skill they first encountered in Grades 6 and 7. The warm-up helps students recognize that the new work is not starting from scratch. It is building on something they already know.

Kristin also uses questions and discussion to help students make connections independently. She might ask students what they think the most common answer—or the most common wrong answer—would be, prompting them to consider possible misconceptions before revealing or discussing the solution. When working with fractions, for example, she guides students through finding a common denominator by asking what happens when they multiply a fraction by ⁵⁄₅. Rather than giving them the answer, she prompts them to recall that ⁵⁄₅ equals one and to consider what happens when a number is multiplied by one. Through this sequence of questions, students connect several pieces of prior knowledge to understand why two fractions that look different can represent the same value. 

This kind of guided thinking encourages students to recognize relationships for themselves rather than simply follow a procedure.

 

 

HIGH SCHOOL: TURNING EXPERIENCE INTO INSIGHT

By High School, students have accumulated years of academic learning and personal experience. PKE therefore increasingly focuses on helping students recognize patterns in what they already know and use that knowledge as a starting point for more complex learning.

Students can draw on previous learning, personal interests, identities, and experiences to make sense of unfamiliar material. Teachers can then build new concepts and academic vocabulary around those existing understandings, helping students move from what feels familiar toward increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking.
 

From Everyday Language to Academic Analysis

For High School English Teacher Jennifer Gagner, that process begins with something students already understand: their own experience with language. 

When teaching a unit on language and cultural context, including the use of swear words, Jennifer began with questions students could answer from their own experiences: “When was the last time you heard or used a swear word? Where were you? Who were you with?”

Students quickly recognized that they already understood something important about language: the words they use—and how they use them—can change depending on the context, audience, relationship, and purpose. They were prompted to think about how they speak with friends compared with how they speak at home or at school, and how language changes in settings such as sports or online spaces.

From that familiar starting point, Jennifer introduced a deeper academic framework for understanding language. Students explored how language functions differently across contexts, how swear words develop cultural meanings, and how language can create connection and relief or establish power, isolate, belittle, and discriminate.

The process illustrates an important dimension of PKE: students may already possess knowledge without having the academic language to identify or explain it. By making that intuitive knowledge visible, teachers can give students new tools to examine what they thought they already understood and help them transfer what they know into a more formal academic context.

 

 

Connecting Personal Experience to Social Issues

A similar approach was used in Felipe Devesa's History of Social Reform in the Americas class, where students' personal experiences served as the starting point for examining inequality within their communities.

For their final project, Grade 11 and 12 students were asked to identify an inequality they had personally observed and propose three possible solutions. Because students were encouraged to draw on issues they had encountered themselves, their projects brought a distinctly personal perspective to the topic.

One student examined differences between men's and women's track and field competitions. Another explored the disparity between male and female executives, drawing on conversations with his mother, one of the few female executives he knew. For another student, a passion for ice skating led to an investigation of gender-related rules she had encountered in her own athletic practice.

In each case, students were not simply applying a concept they had learned in class to an assigned scenario. Their own experiences and interests helped determine what they would investigate—and gave them a meaningful reason to engage with the academic content.

“When we hear Prior Knowledge & Experience, most people think about those diagnostic assessments at the beginning of a course to see what academic background our students are bringing from previous years,” Felipe explained. “But it doesn’t stop there. We’re also talking about the experiences and knowledge students acquire outside of school—their reality, their culture, the things they’re interested in and do outside of school. When students are interested in learning something and connect it to their personal lives, their performance tends to be better.”

 

 

6 WAYS FAMILIES CAN SUPPORT PRIOR KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE AT HOME

Learning doesn't stop at the classroom door. Families can help children recognize that what they already know, experience, wonder about, and discover outside of school is also part of their learning.

1. Encourage Exploration
Reading, travel, conversations, hobbies, and exposure to different people and places all give children experiences they can draw on later. Encourage your child to be curious about the world and to explore topics that interest them. A museum visit, a conversation with a grandparent, a new recipe, a soccer game, or a book about a favorite animal can all become part of the knowledge they bring to future learning.

2. Ask What They Already Know
When a new topic comes up, ask your child what they already know about it or what it reminds them of. The connection doesn't have to be obvious or directly related. Sometimes an unexpected connection is where a new idea begins.

Try asking:

• What do you already know about this?
• Have you ever experienced something like this?
• Does this remind you of anything you've learned before?
• What does this make you think of?

These questions help children recognize that their existing knowledge can be a resource for new learning.


3. Share Family Experiences
Parents have their own knowledge and experiences that children may not encounter at school. Share stories, perspectives, traditions, and things you've learned, and help your child make connections between those experiences and what they are learning at school. 

This can help them see that knowledge doesn't come only from textbooks or classrooms. It also comes from people, experiences, cultures, communities, and everyday life.


4. Ask Questions Instead of Giving Answers
When your child encounters a problem, resist the urge to immediately solve it for them. Instead, help them think through possible solutions, make connections to what they already know, and learn from mistakes. 

Try asking:

• What have you tried so far?
• Does this remind you of another problem you've solved?
• What do you think might happen?
• What else could you try?

The goal isn’t to leave children to figure everything out alone. It’s to help them develop the habit of drawing on what they already know when they encounter something new or challenging.


5. Talk About Learning, Not Just School
Instead of asking only “How was school today?”, invite your child to talk about what they are learning and how their thinking is developing.

Try asking:

• What is something new you learned today?
• Did anything surprise you?
• Did you make a connection to something you already knew?
• Did you change your mind about something?
• What are you still wondering about?
• Can you show me something you're working on?

These conversations help children recognize learning as an ongoing process that connects what they already know with what they are discovering now.


6. Build a Rich Vocabulary
Don't shy away from using specific or unfamiliar words with your child. The more language children encounter and understand, the more tools they have to describe their experiences, make connections, and develop new ideas. 

When children spend time exploring a topic that interests them—whether it's sports, music, animals, science, art, or something else—they naturally build a vocabulary they can draw on later.

You don't need to simplify every conversation. Introduce new words, explain them in context, and encourage your child to use them. Over time, that growing vocabulary becomes part of the knowledge they bring to new learning.

 

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE IS A FOUNDATION

From a first grader drawing how they think a worm will grow to a Middle School student recognizing a math concept they learned years earlier, Prior Knowledge & Experience reminds us that learning never begins at zero.

What students already know, have experienced, and wonder about provides a foundation for new learning. When students learn to recognize those connections, draw on their experiences, ask questions, and reflect on how their thinking changes, they become more active and increasingly independent learners. 

PKE is not simply about looking back at what students already know. It's about using that knowledge to understand where they are, make sense of something new, and determine where they can go next.

And families play an important role in that process. Every conversation, experience, question, book, hobby, trip, and discovery can add another piece to the knowledge and experience children carry with them—into the classroom and into their lives as lifelong learners.