The following is an example of how you might activate prior knowledge if you were working with the book Tiger Can’t Sleep by S.J. Fore. You can present to the students the idea that it is about a little boy and a tiger who are having trouble sleeping, though the why of why they can’t sleep is something that they will learn later. The topic of having trouble getting to sleep is one that every single person on the planet has had, probably many times over, and all of the students will surely have had this problem too. 
Begin by doing a think aloud about a time when you have had trouble sleeping and why. If I was doing it, I would tell them about a time when I had to get up early in the morning for a big exam, but people who lived above me in an apartment were having a party and making a lot of noise, making it difficult. Or I might talk about a time when I was nervous for a first day at school, and I tossed and turned and had trouble getting to sleep. 
I would then ask the students about their own experiences like this, and I would ask them to share some of them in front of the rest of the class. Encourage them to talk about why they were having trouble sleeping, or if there was a person or people responsible for them having trouble, or if there was a reason they really needed to get to sleep at a specific time. If a student talks about feeling stress, ask them if there was a way that they resolved their stress or started to think differently or action they took so that they would finally able to get some sleep. 
Write these examples down in front of the students, and then pair them up for a think-pair-share session. Give them some time to be introspective about their own experiences with this topic and instruct them to think of the other experiences shared and how they can relate to them. After a quiet thinking session, have them talk to their partners about these experiences. 
After giving them some time to talk, talk to them about how whenever they receive a new text that they are expected to read, that they should look at the cover or the summary on the back and 
think about what the topic of the text is, and what they already know. Talk to them about how they can find out what they already know about this topic by thinking about their experiences and about what they have heard or learned in the past about it. 
That leads into the next strategy that you can also use, which is teaching them how to summarize. 
Summarizing is an important skill for students to learn to help their comprehension throughout their lives. It is something they can do to check and reinforce their comprehension not just in the early grades, but throughout high school, university, and even in the workplace or at home whenever they have to read and digest new texts. Summarizing can take multiple forms. It can be done as a student goes along during their reading, or it can be done after reading, depending on the text. It can be in a written form, especially when students are a little older than this class, or they can reflect on what happens by drawing images or just retelling what happened orally. No matter the form, it involves a student communicating the core details of the text and showing an understanding of the events, characters, or ideas in the text. 
