"A list for improving literacy with focus on middle grades." <[email protected]> on Friday, November 17, 2006 at 5:53 AM -0500 wrote: >this kind of dscussion always intrigues and scares me a bit. As a >reading teacher, I am wary of the "everyone teaches reading syndrome" >for a few reasons. First of all content teachers immediately get upset. >They don't want to teach reading--they will be the first to tell you >they don't know how and that scares them. All kinds of walls go up. > >The way i approach it with them is that each subject has a language of >its own and that I can help them with strategies that will help their >kids learn the language of science or social studies or math. They are >even usually wiling to look at text structure and organization and will >admit that teaching science is teaching cause and effect, and teaching >social studies is teaching main idea--supporting details and >chronological order.
Mary Anne and Ginny, You've brought out a really important point, which is the need to help content-area teachers understand both the whys and the hows of teaching reading across the curriculum. Without the first, there's no motivation; without the second, there's no clear path to meet the goals. No wonder a simple mandate to start teaching reading upsets content area teachers! Need-targeted professional development seems to be the key for many schools. I love the point about science being largely cause and effect, and social studies being largely main idea with supporting details and chronological order. I think if you factor in the arts, you also get a discussion about surface appearance and underlying form (certainly this is what my Humanities students have been discussing over the past three weeks). And, as I think about it, there can be a cause-and-effect component to Humanities as well - the nature/nurture discussion certainly can apply in both areas, for example. Similarly, studying the history of science (for example, the chronological progression of models of an atom) can help bring out truths about the nature of science itself. Our science teacher and I are looking into following up on two opportunities to integrate. The kids want to do another Psychology unit, and we're thinking of timing that unit to coincide with the Genetics unit. Similarly, a proposed Humanities unit on public opinion and global warming can obviously connect to a unit on environmental science. We even found a simple French language lab on the greenhouse effect which they could do in the Exploring Language class! Exciting... Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
