How to Help Students Generalize Their Literacy Skills
Do you know how many minutes a day (on average) your students spend learning about literacy versus science and social studies?
According to the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, students spend over 80 minutes a day receiving language arts instruction compared to an average of 21 minutes in science and 18 minutes in social studies.
These numbers drop even more significantly when students who are struggling with literacy are pulled from class to receive additional reading instruction.
Students need this content area instruction to develop background knowledge, a key contributor to their overall comprehension development. They need to engage in this content area instruction to foster well-rounded knowledge, spark interest in different subjects, and understand the world around us.
So…what do we do?
We want to be clear - we are in no way suggesting we take away time from literacy instruction. When 66% of fourth graders aren’t reading on grade level, we need them to be getting as much literacy instruction as possible.
Instead, we are asking the question -
How can we overlap our literacy and content-area instruction?
Instead of focusing on literacy only in our literacy block - what if we could explicitly show students how their reading and writing skills apply to math, science, and social studies?
How to incorporate your literacy instruction across different content areas.
In literacy, we target skills like decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. Skills that students need to be successful across all content areas.
Every one of the reading/writing skills we work on in our literacy lessons are applicable to other subjects.
Here are just a few ideas of how we can incorporate your literacy instruction across different content areas.
Targeting Phonological Awareness in Different Subject Areas
When students are learning about a new science term, ask them to syllabicate it. For example - if learning about mitochondria, have them divide this word into mi-to-chon-dri-a. If they are learning about fractions in math, ask them to come up with a word that rhymes with fractions.
Targeting Phonics in Different Subject Areas
Using the same words in our PA example, ask students to look for phonics patterns or syllable types they know. For example, mitochondria has multiple open syllables. This is a great example of “ch” saying /k/ and a shwa ‘a’ at the end of the word. "
Targeting Vocabulary in Different Subject Areas
In literacy, we use >>this graphic organization strategy<< to help students define their words. This same framework, where students have to come up with a category, function, synonym, and antonym/shade of meaning can work for different content areas as well.
For example,
A fraction is a thing that shows part of a whole number. It’s like a decimal but written differently.
An ecosystem is an area where living things and nonliving things interact with their environment. It’s like a community but it includes all aspects of the environment (including animals, weather, microorganisms, etc.).
A capital is the city where the state’s government is located. It’s like a town but not like a state.
Click >>here<< to grab the free vocabulary definition framework.
Targeting Fluency in Different Subject Areas
When we talk about reading fluency, our goal is for students to read in a way that sounds like spoken language. This is going to support comprehension. This is important for all styles of text (narrative, informative, etc.) and across all content areas. Students need to practice reading articles, textbooks, and other content-specific writing to support their fluency, and thereby their comprehension.
Targeting Comprehension in Different Subject Areas
We use graphic organizers to support reading comprehension across all subject areas.
For example -
The direct recall organizer asks students to identify the “who/what, did what, when, where, why, how” in a story or passage. This can be used in social studies to outline different events. The sequencing graphic organizer is great for science to explain chemical reactions or cycles (the cause & effect organizer is great here, too!)
>>Click here<< to grab our free structured comprehension guide.
We don’t need to separate literacy from our other instruction.
In fact, integrating literacy into our other content area instruction helps students generalize their skills & get extra practice.
How to intentionally integrate literacy into your content-area instruction -
You can absolutely add literacy skills to your instruction here and there as you get started.
We’ve found that creating science/social studies units (that target all of our literacy skills and support content-area knowledge) has allowed us to be intentional in our instruction and keep everything organized.
Here’s how we do it -
We start by taking a science or social studies concept that our students are learning about.
For today’s example, we’ll use volcanos.
We start by writing an informative passage about this topic.
Then, we create literacy activities like PA drills, phonics games, vocabulary work, comprehension questions, writing prompts, etc. using the passage as a guide.
Our PA drills and phonics games are created using words that come directly from the passage.
We use the vocabulary definition framework and select a few words from our science passage to include in our unit materials.
We’ll pull sentences from the passage to target sentence-level fluency before moving on to passage-level fluency. We work with students to answer comprehension questions (that target all 5 levels of processing) and add graphic organizers in as necessary.
We’ll pull spelling words from our science passage and have students answer a writing prompt that relates to their topic.
As we build more and more of these units, we’ll add them to our library. Since we are working in an intervention setting, we create units for a variety of topics and across a variety of levels. We organize them by category (like you see in the picture) so that we can pull relevant and/or interesting topics for our students.
So again, using our literacy strategies within the other content areas is helpful because -
It explicitly teaches students to generalize their literacy skills.
It allows students to build background knowledge in the different content areas.
It offers distributed practice for both literacy AND content-area skills.
If you are looking to add science/social studies-themed units to your instruction this year, we’d love to share the ones we’ve made with you!
You can find them all inside our 5CCL Learning Lab.