Reading In The Content Areas Social Studies

This invaluable guide offers step-by-step, research-based strategies that will help you increase your students' reading comprehension, strengthen writing skills, and build vocabulary across content areas.

Help students read about social studies content and build their historical thinking skills! This 2nd edition resource was created to support College and Career Readiness Standards, and provides an in-depth research base about content-area literacy instruction, including key strategies to help students read and comprehend historical content. Each strategy includes classroom examples by grade ranges (1-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) and necessary support materials, such as graphic organizers, templates, or digital resources to help teachers implement quickly and easily. Specific suggestions for differentiating instruction are also provided to help English language learners, gifted students, and students reading below grade level.

This is an excellent reference book for curriculum planning and enhancement.

Preparing students to be active, informed, literate citizens is one of the primary functions of public schools. But how can students become engaged citizens if they can't read, let alone understand, their social studies texts? What can educators—and social studies teachers in particular—do to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and motivation to become engaged in civic life? Building Literacy in Social Studies addresses this question by presenting both the underlying concepts and the research-based techniques that teachers can use to engage students and build the skills they need to become successful readers, critical thinkers, and active citizens. The authors provide targeted strategies—including teaching models, graphic organizers, and step-by-step instructions—for activities such as * Building vocabulary, * Developing textbook literacy skills, * Interpreting primary and secondary sources, * Applying critical thinking skills to newspapers and magazines, and * Evaluating Internet sources. Readers will also learn how to organize classrooms into models of democracy by creating learning communities that support literacy instruction, distribute authority, encourage cooperation, and increase accountability among students. Realistic scenarios depict a typical social studies teacher's experience before and after implementing the strategies in the classroom, showing their potential to make a significant difference in how students respond to instruction. By making literacy strategies a vital part of content-area instruction, teachers not only help students better understand their schoolwork but also open students' eyes to the power that informed and engaged people have to change the world.

What does it mean to teach reading in the context of the middle and high school classroom? Don’t students already know how to read by the time they get to secondary school? And how can a busy teacher take time away from the packed curriculum of science, history, mathematics, or language arts to teach reading? This book presents a linguistic approach to teaching reading in different subjects; an approach that focuses on language itself. Central to this approach is a view that knowledge is constructed in and through language and that language changes with changes in knowledge. As students move from elementary to secondary schools, they encounter specialized knowledge and engage in new contexts of learning in all subjects. This means that the language of secondary school learning is quite different from the language of the elementary years. While in the elementary years the subject matter of reading materials is often close to students’ everyday life experiences, the curriculum of secondary school deals with knowledge that is removed from students’ personal lives and everyday contexts. The language that constructs this more specialized knowledge thus tends to be more abstract, technical, information-laden, and hierarchically organized than the more familiar and “friendly” language that students typically encounter during the elementary years. Students need to develop specialized literacies (literacy relevant to each content area) as well as a critical literacy they can use across subject areas to engage with, reflect on, and assess specialized and advanced knowledge. This functional language analysis approach is shown using actual secondary social studies, science, and math textbooks and using a literary text.

Based on interactive elements that apply to every reading situation, the authors explain instructional strategies that work best in the subject areas and how to optimize those classrooms for reading, writing, and discussion.

Based on the best-selling Six-Way Paragraphs books, these individual titles help students master the essential skills needed to organize, understand, and apply information in math, science, and social studies. Here are the books that will open doors for you into your content area classrooms.