Using texts with thought-provoking science and social studies content during the literacy block facilitates comprehension in any subject area.
We often hear the phrase “children learn to read and then read to learn.” Educators W. Dorsey Hammond and Denise D. Nessel (2011) suggest reversing this mantra: “Read to learn and you will learn to read.” These esteemed educators recognize that reading is about comprehending what you decode. So while our literacy block might be thought of as a time and place for teaching reading, it is also a time and place for learning content if we use texts with strong science and social studies subject matter. Using texts with thought-provoking science and social studies content during the literacy block has several advantages.
Using texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block capitalizes on the natural curiosity of students. Children’s brains actively seek knowledge; it’s how the human brain works. Putting interesting, content-rich texts in front of children in the literacy block encourages them to ask questions and wonder about the ideas being presented through words and graphics. As teachers engage learners in discussions of those student-generated questions, learners begin to “generate hypotheses” (Dorsey & Nessel, 2011).
For example, in a lesson with a group of third graders reading the informational text, Amazing Salamanders, the students used text features such as table of contents and photographs with labels and captions to generate interest and questions about the scientific content. As they were scanning the text, one student read these words aloud: “Some are smaller than your finger and some are larger than a person.” Amid “wow’s” and laughter, another student responded, “Do they eat people?” This generated excitement for reading to find out.
This thinking—asking questions, generating hypotheses, reading for information, discussing findings—takes advantage of students’ ongoing curiosity and encourages them to develop this way of thinking while reading self-selected informational texts. Answering self-generated questions and confirming, rejecting, or expanding one’s hypotheses become one’s custom for reading informational texts.
Using texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block builds knowledge necessary for thinking critically. All readers bring background knowledge to their reading experiences; effective teachers activate this knowledge during their literacy lessons. Novice readers may bring some relevant knowledge, bring incomplete, mistaken, or naïve knowledge, or some mix of both to their reading experiences. Reading builds knowledge necessary for thinking critically.
As the third graders reading Amazing Salamanders discovered, one’s background often contains misconceptions as well as relevant knowledge. In the discussion before reading the text, one student discussed salamanders and lizards as though they were the same animal. Once he read the introduction, he thought critically about his thinking and clarified for the group how his thinking had changed. “Forget what I said about them being lizards. It says right here ‘They look like lizards but they are not lizards.’ I thought they were lizards. They look exactly like lizards…” Later in the lesson, another before-reading idea this same student shared about salamanders being poisonous was confirmed for him as he continued reading. He pointed out to the group an idea in the chapter on how salamanders stay safe: “I knew the poison comes out of their skin. It says here it’s one of the ways they stay safe.”
As students read informational texts, they have opportunities to think critically about what they knew or thought they knew as they compare and integrate the science or social studies content they learn from reading a text with their own thinking. This kind of critical thinking can be developed during the literacy block; what is more, this kind of thinking serves students well beyond this literacy setting.
Using texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block encourages learning interesting information while simultaneously developing reading abilities. Meaning is the purpose of reading; it’s why we use reading skills and strategies. Reading in content-rich texts keeps this purposeful, meaning-making reason front and center while students experience the payoff of using reading skills and strategies.
As the third grade students read Amazing Salamanders, they encountered sophisticated text organizational structures and vocabulary which required advanced reading skills and strategies. For example, chapter headings and their subheadings require students to anticipate and organize understandings and big ideas as they read through the text. In addition, scientific vocabulary was challenging: damp environment, glands, nocturnal, larvae, and metamorphosis. Students needed to use their increasing knowledge of letter clusters, affixes, and root and compound words and contextual information to solve unknown scientific conceptual words. Furthermore, scientific processes described in this text use advanced language structures (e.g., Metamorphosis begins when the salamander larvae are about three weeks old.) In this example, students need advanced reading strategies to process phrases, clauses, and the conjunction when to understand relationships among the ideas of change, life stages, and time involved in metamorphosis found in this one sentence as well as integrate this thinking with the sentences and paragraphs that follow. Complex text and ideas require strategic thinking.
The kinds of reading strategies necessary for students to comprehend science and social studies content of this nature are sophisticated. Using texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block creates a powerful context for learning interesting information while simultaneously offering opportunities to teach ever-developing and increasingly-complex reading strategies.
Using texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block promotes strong thinking, reading, and discussion habits for students. Teachers know the ways students think, read, and talk in whole and small group teacher-led lessons build habits for how to think, read, and, yes, talk (or prepare to talk) when reading independently. Teaching during the literacy block with texts based on science and social studies content teaches children how to approach texts of this nature and think in productive ways. In addition, as readers think, read, and discuss content in subject-driven texts, teachers are able to assess comprehension and decoding abilities, and determine what support readers need to comprehend more complex texts.
In Amazing Salamanders, Chapter 1: ‘What Are Salamanders?’ explores four ways these amphibians breathe air to get oxygen. In an introductory sentence to the paragraphs that discuss breathing, the text says: There are four different ways that salamanders do this. In the discussion after students read this chapter, however, students revealed their understandings to include only three. As readers, the introductory sentence, directly stating there were four different ways that salamanders breath air to get oxygen, did not make the readers generate a question (i.e., What are the four ways?) and read to find this information. So, although the students could decode the text, their comprehension was incomplete. And it was only through discussion the students and their teacher recognized this misconception; once this sentence was brought to their attention and they were encouraged to reread were they able to amend their thinking. This experience became a teaching moment about the importance of sentences such as the one discussed here and the kinds of thinking these sentences should generate.
Peter Johnston (2012) wrote, “Thinking well together leads to thinking well alone,” to remind us the role reading, thinking, and talking alongside others plays to increase our meaning-making abilities. Engaging with the thinking of others as we read texts with science and social studies content during the literacy block is one important way we increase our own comprehension. Debra Crouch.