Chapter 5

1. Chapter 5 Reading and Writing in Social Studies

2. Looking Ahead • What role does information and communication skills have in the social studies curriculum? • What information skills are most essential to social studies? • What tools are available for teachers and students for teaching/learning these skills? • What pitfalls/problems exist for teachers and students when utilizing those tools?

3. Can You? • Name the four basic purposes for reading and writing assignments in social studies? • Identify the specific reading abilities students need in social studies? • Explain how to use textbooks with students who cannot read? • Think of ways to use fiction books in social studies? • Help students use the Internet for research?

4. Do You? • Know what students dislike most about using references? • Know how to break students out of the "copy from the Internet"? • Know how to make social studies book reports interesting? • Know how to help students learn to organize their writing? • Know several ways to teach new concepts and new vocabulary? • Know some ways to actually shorten what students have to read? • Know why it is important for students to understand the organization of reading material?

5. Focus Activity • What was your favorite book(s) as a teenager? Why? • Do you remember reading or having it read to you by a parent or teacher? • Share experiences with classmates. • Discuss the details of the book(s) and how you might use them in your classroom?

6. Every Teacher is a Reading Teacher • Why should every middle/secondary teacher be considered a reading teacher?

7. Reading and Writing Assignments in Social Studies • What traits should an effective assignment have? • Provoke the curiosity of students • Teacher facilitated (i.e. challenging but not impossible) • Able to be accomplished in a fair amount of time for the appropriate age and ability of students • Clearly organized and understandable

8. Reading Skills Needed in Social Studies • Recognize the organization of reading materials • Bring meaning to reading • Read for a purpose • Read critically

9. Helping Students Read Social Studies Materials • Pre-teach difficult vocabulary prior to reading. • Reduce the length of independent reading tasks. • Provide specific, clear purposes for reading. • Help students get a sense of the "story" that the reading material is telling, developing their predictive skills.

10. Strategies for Developing Vocabulary • Teacher Explanation of Meaning • Frayer Model • Classifying Experiences • Extended Teacher Definitions • Teacher-Provided Experiences • Student-Centered Experiences

11. Less Can Be More: Quality Reading in Social Studies • What are some ways a teacher can reduce the quantity but maintain the quality of the social studies reading? • Use student-written summaries instead of the text • Use teacher-written summaries instead of the text • Use textbook cut-ups • Try textbook highlighting • Experiment with question write-ins • Cooperate with class divide-ups

12. Reading Textbooks • What do teachers need to do in order to use textbooks effectively? • Give specific purposeful assignments • Stimulate interest in doing the reading • Make sure that students have the skills needed to do the assignment • Provide supervision, monitoring, and help where needed • Follow up on reading assignments

13. Helping Students Develop a Sense of the “Story” by Aiding Predictions • It provides purposes for reading in the form of expectations. • It heightens anticipation and interest. • It helps determine in what way materials relate to particular interests, questions, • hypotheses, and so on. • It provides advance organizers for thinking about what is read. • It aids in predicting.

14. Purposeful Reading • Provide guided questions before reading that identify specific types of information and understandings the student is to gain. • Provide study questions that ask the student to identify the ways an author thinks and to go beyond the author’s thoughts. • Alert students prior to reading to follow-up tasks that will employ particular knowledge and concepts.

15. Reading Question and Task Statements • What strategies can help students better understand the questions they are being asked? • Teach students to be sensitive to the nature of question words and to the nature of the answers these words demand (i.e. who, what, where, etc…) • Alerting students to organizational features of textbooks related to questions

16. Reading Social Studies Themed Trade Books • What are trade books? • Trade books are a variety of reading topics and formats, including biographies, fiction, and poetry; written for various levels. • Why might you utilize biographies? Fiction? Poetry? • Visit www.NCSS.org for the Notable Trade Books for Young Readers annual list for the last few years.

17. Connecting Reading and Writing in Social Studies • Economic Reports • Archeology Reports • Story Museum Reports • Comic Reports • Shoe Box Story Parade • Book Trials • Historical Creation Reports • Story Geography • Sociometries of Books • Publicity and Review Reports

18. Organizing to Write • What are the two major kinds of difficulties students experience with writing assignments in social studies? • clarity of the assignment • how well prepared students are for an assignment • What are the base or prerequisite skills needed for many if not all writing jobs? • Note Taking • Writing Answers to Questions • Outlining • Do NOT assume students know how to do this

19. Developing Research and Reporting Skills • What are the benefits of having students complete reports? • What type of reporting is best for middle/secondary students? • What is a real danger in having students complete reports?

20. Writing Creatively • In-Role Writing? • Modeling Cultures? • Problem-Solving Stories? • Diary? • Collaborative Writing?

21. Looking Back • Social studies is knowledge based most readily communicated through print. • Reading and writing grows through practice and they are linked to thinking. • There are several strategies that teachers can use to help students • Pre-teaching vocabulary • Reducing the actual length of reading assignments • Providing sufficient and clear purposes for reading • Developing predictive skills

22. Extension • You have been procrastinating in completing your trade book adoptions project. Feeling a little stressed about the timeline you consider alternatives. In the end you decide you only have two options. • Option One: Develop your own list of twenty books you could use in your classroom to help teach social studies. • Option Two: Partner with your other grade level teachers and develop one list of twenty books that all the teachers in your grade will utilize to help teach social studies.

23. Extension • Select an option. • Develop a trade book adoption list. The list should include at least twenty books recently published trade books. • The list should also include all bibliographic information: • summary of the books, • discussion of how you could use the book in social studies • possible state and national standards addressed

24. Extension • What are the advantages/disadvantages of having your other grade level teachers input and adopting one set of trade books? • What are the advantages/disadvantages of selecting your own list of twenty books for adoption? • What qualities, topics, etc… would you seek in the new books?

25. Self-Test • What are the four basic purposes for which reading and writing assignments are used in independent seat work? • What are the qualities that you need to look for in a nonfiction book? • What are some different kinds of fictional material that can be used in social studies? • What are the purposes of learning research and reporting skills? • How are guidelines useful in making textbook questions more meaningful?

26. Self-Test • Why do teachers have students write reports and present them orally? • Describe several ways of teaching concepts and vocabulary to students. • What is SQ3R? • What is meant by the term purposeful reading and why is the concept important?

27. Resources • The Great Books Foundation- http://www.greatbooks.org/ • NCSS Notable Trade Books http://www.socialstudies.org/resources/notable • Vacca, R.T., Vacca, J.L. & Mraz, M.E. (2010). Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.