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The importance of student prior knowledge, and activating it to help enable them to learn new knowledge, is well known (see The Best Resources For Learning About The Importance Of Prior Knowledge (& How To Activate It)).

Funds of Knowledge, a concept developed by Professor Luis Moll, refers specifically to the prior knowledge developed by students and their families through the “social and emotional experiences” of their lives.

Another way of putting it is that Funds of Knowledge refers to much of what our students have learned outside of school.

Doing a survey among students to help uncover those Funds is a common way of learning about them.  Once you know them, you can then incorporate some of them into lessons.

It’s easy to create your own Funds of Knowledge survey, but why reinvent the wheel?

Here are the best ones available online:

This one is from Bank Street.

Here’s a survey from Reading is Fundamental.

The Family Engagement Center offers another version.

The last page of this Funds of Knowledge Toolkit has one.

This one is from Branch Alliance.