Previous research suggests that activating background knowledge immediately prior to read-alouds in Kindergarten is an important strategy for improving children's learning (e.g. Cervetti & Hiebert, 2015). But, because children's background knowledge varies considerably at the individual level, teachers are also often providing relevant background knowledge immediately prior to reading (Pearson, 2013), the effectiveness of which has not been as well studied. The goal of the current study is to examine differences in children's attention, comprehension and learning from books in scenarios where background knowledge is "activated" before reading, or "provided" before reading. To that end, 60 participants were either tested on familiar information, or trained and tested on completely novel information prior to reading a story. Regression analyses show that while students in both groups comprehended the story, attention and learning were both more successful when children already knew a great deal about a topic and merely had their knowledge activated.