Week 3

How are you going to incorporate literacy into your content area?  If you are an elementary teacher, how would you integrate literacy into science, math or social studies?  Detail a specific example, including an assessment strategy.  Don’t forget to think about your diverse learners and something you may need to do differently for below or above average readers.

As an elementary school teacher I feel that we incorporate literacy into all content areas without even realizing it.  In math,I think that we mostly incorporate literacy through our standardized test preparation.  We teach our students how to look at a problem and decode it much like they have to decode words when they read.  The students have to pick out the important information, and re-read to figure out what they are expected to do with that information.  Once they have solved their problem the students often have to explain how they got their answer.  Just like when we write, the students revise and edit their explanations to make sure that they were clear and made sense.  We even talk about word choice with them.  When it is possible too, we like to incorporate literature into our lessons.  There are many trade books that correlate with our lessons that we can read as an introduction.  For example: when we are teaching about how to read and write larger numbers we can read the book, "How Much is a Million".  

I also teach Social Studies.  When we do our lessons, especially since my partner teacher has a primarily ELL class every year, we focus on vocabulary.  We make books and drawings to help the students learn what the meanings of the words are.  I have found with this group of students there are many words outside of our basic vocabulary words that we take for granted that they know, when in fact they have no idea.  We use graphic organizers like KWL charts to evaluate what we know about topics.  We also use leveled readers to focus in on each unit.  With these readers the students are learning the same main ideas, however the reading difficulty varies in each set.  This way my advanced readers are being challenged, and my struggling readers aren't having as much trouble comprehending because the vocabulary is more appropriate for them.