5 Summary

Brainstorming is a useful way of determining and activating prior knowledge of a topic by your students. (See Resources 3 and 4 about setting up a brainstorming session and effective brainstorming.)

As you have observed, brainstorming has a great role to play in your teaching. Through brainstorming your students are encouraged to learn about the subject by actively sharing information, experiences and opinions. At the same time, this gives you information and insight into their current understandings so that you can plan their next steps in learning about sound or other science topics such as electricity, water and light. By using brainstorming you will find out which students need extra support with certain tasks if they are to understand a topic.

You may now want to revisit Resource 3, ‘Assessing progress and performance’, to remind yourself that knowing what your students already know can improve your teaching.