Discover ways to support literacy skills such as predicting, inference, cause and effect, and categorizing, as well as build STEM vocabulary and background knowledge, at home and in the classroom.
When fiction and nonfiction books are integrated into the teaching of a content area such as science, graphic organizers are useful for organizing information and enabling students to classify observations and facts, comprehend the relationships among phenomenon, draw conclusions, develop explanations, and generalize scientific concepts.
A veteran teacher describes how she used visualization, Google images, video, and Skype to build background knowledge and enrich her students’ classroom read aloud of a fiction book about ospreys.
An English language learner may not have an advanced English vocabulary, but with the right kind of curriculum and instruction, teachers may be surprised at the knowledge ELLs can gain. Science lends itself well to developing ELL students’ language and content knowledge because there are so many opportunities for hands-on learning and observation.
When kids have lots of experiences to draw on, they have a better chance of making a connection with what they read! Help your child build background knowledge this summer with these activities.
Educators may find timelines a useful strategy for a variety of educational purposes. They can be used to record events from a story or a history lesson in a sequential format. They can help students keep events in chronological order as they write summaries.
Media-rich and interactive websites can play an essential role in science instruction. They can encourage students to think critically, by providing tools for modeling, visualization, and simulation tools; discussion and scaffolding; and data collection and analysis.
The Walking Classroom program is an in-school obesity intervention that promotes health literacy and develops and supports lifelong fitness habits for all students while addressing different learning styles. The method combines standards-aligned academic content and exercise during the regular school day. Using WalkKits pre-loaded with a year’s worth of standards-aligned audio content, students walk, listen and learn.
Children’s nonfiction picture books is a genre that is exploding in both quality and quantity. Recent nonfiction books reveal an emphasis on the visual, an emphasis on accuracy, and an engaging writing style. Suggestions are included for choosing and using nonfiction picture books in the classroom.
Inquiry-based, discovery-focused science instruction is widely viewed as best practice today. Students learn science best when it is integrated with other areas of the curriculum such as reading, language arts, and mathematics. This includes reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines, online information, and children’s and young adult literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
Many texts contain language (figurative and literal) that can be a barrier to comprehension. We need to see those language walls and teach students how to scale them so their reading has meaning.
