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We are about to start our animal unit next week. During our animal unit we not only learn about specific types of animals (mammals, fish, etc.), but we focus on the nonfiction text features that we find in those books. They eventually will research their own animal of choice and create a book using those text features (caption, heading, index, etc.). This year our team is incorporating all the subjects so we met with our literacy coach on how we could do this and improve upon how it went last year. Last year my students were really proud of their accomplishment on creating their own non-fiction book, and this was something even my struggling readers could feel a sense of pride in because it was their work.

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I try to incorporate reading and writing across all of my disciplines. Read alouds are the best approach in my classroom, and my students' seem to benefit from this the best. They are able to work together to collaborate with ideas and think further and more in depth with each other. Another strategy I am trying, specifically for my 1 on 1 student but with the class as a whole is to be an explorer and find treasures in their books. They are on many different reading levels, but they have learned that they can find words, pictures or letters they know or are interested in. Each students has a different subject and different interest that they have worked to identify this year, and when they know what they like, they can learn anything across the board. With our writing, my students use our focus in SS or Science and have writing prompts to flow along in our reading groups. One strategy my students have enjoyed is creating their own patterned books. They get to choose a topic and use their writing skills to create a book for our classroom or their home library. They are able to critique and collaborate together to build their confidence and interest in all disciplines.

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The first thing that comes to mind when I think about disciplinary literacy is using the I-Pick model for finding good fit books.  We talk about the purpose of the books we are checking out- if we are doing research we are going to want one thing,  while we are looking for something entirely different if we are looking at books for recreation.  Our good fit books will change based on how we are reading the material- if we are looking for specific information from a text, we may be able to get a more difficult book because we are not having to read every page.  It also means that we have to work on different strategies on how to interpret the information that we are reading.   Research also requires different approaches to the material, and we have to be aware not only of how to read the material we are looking at (graphs, pictures, texts, maps, etc) but also of what resources we have to interpret them.

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I believe that integrating reading and writing through disciplinary literacy is how we should teach children. Last year I learned a lot about disciplinary literacy and tried it out in the classroom every chance I got. This year I am in a new district with new ELA curriculum. I have found that many of our ELA units lend themselves to teaching through a disciplinary literacy stance where some it is more difficult. I currently provide my students with these opportunities when I can. I am currently teaching our investigation unit and it lends itself to teaching through disciplinary literacy. I am teaching my students how to research, while teaching reading and writing strategies so that they will be successful in reading and writing non-fiction. Modeling through non-fiction read alouds has been my go strategy during this unit. I have found it to be very important and beneficial to model non-fiction reading strategies for my students. I feel as though my students are learning science content and applying their non-fiction reading and writing strategies to learn new information independently.

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I work in a STEAM school, where there is a heavy presence of inquiry and using inquiry-drive strategies to teach. I tend to use inquiry to guide most of my reading and writing, simply because it all flows together very well if you are able to make the right connections. I like to give my students the opportunity to ask questions about new topics and use that to guide my instruction. I do not typically teach ELA directly, I spend a lot of time with math, science, and social studies and integrating reading and writing into those disciplines. I think it makes the learning and content much more fun for the students and it ultimately gives them their own choice in what they want to do and how they choose to present learned information.

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I work in a STEAM school, which allows lots of opportunities for cross- curricular integration. Reading and writing are such a large aspect of planning for inquiry based units. Often times, literacy is the gateway into these projects. I don't feel as if I teach reading and writing in isolation any longer. Students have the opportunity to fully engage in their science, social studies, and even math standards, with literacy focus, which in turn means they are often meeting multiple content areas in one lesson. I have found that my students are more engaged with their learning and have more opportunities to hold themselves accountable using this approach. I have also found that students are more willing to read and write in this format, because they have voice and choice. Even when using a more structured setting, I allow students the opportunity to show their understanding in their own way and format. Students also spend a lot of time communicating about their learning, which further integrates standards and 21st Century skills.

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I believe that students learn best when they are engaged in connected meaningful learning experiences which can be provided if we integrated literacy across the disciplines. The content that we teach provides the substance and the variety for our literacy instruction that can take on many forms across the day. Literacy components come alive when students have the opportunity to read high-quality texts that inspire and support their curiosity and understanding of science or social studies. They benefit from activities that provide opportunities to collaborate and communicate as they develop speaking and listening skills while learning in PBL units. Writing is another powerful tool that is used differently across disciplines, so teaching students how to write according to the discipline once again provides them with meaningful and substantial interactions that will help them grow in literacy as well as in understanding  content areas.

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I try to provide my students with multiple opportunities to read and write through a disciplinary literacy stance. I love to do read alouds and then the think aloud within that. This really helps my struggling readers. Another great strategy is using visual literacy. My students are extremely visual and this provides them important and critical information in a different format. These can be used with any content in the form of pictures, diagrams, graphs, etc. One strategy I am working on is close reading. The two writing strategies I like to use the most are stop and jot and quick writes. The stop and jot really helps my students hold their thinking and/or answer specific questions. This helps me to really see if they "get it" or not. The quick writes I use as an exit slip or entrance slip to help me know what the students have learned and what may need to be clarified. Many great strategies to help break down content and to see it in a different way.

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Disciplinary literacy is a powerful tool to not only reinforce literacy concepts but to further enhance the learning of content knowledge in Social Studies, Science and Math. Many of the articles that I have read indicate the power that incorporating disciplinary within other content area that helps students better understand the content while promoting critical thinking. This is especially critical in my middle school where each ELA class is only allotted 60 minutes of instructional time. ELA teachers are dependent on the other content area teachers to reinforce the skills taught while exposing them to more chances to read, comprehend and critically think. When it comes to writing, teaching in Social Studies how to answer TDQs or TDAs in the form of DBQs, helps reinforce the writing process, citing textual evidence and stating a claim. In Science, it could be the same with writing, helping students to state their claim and supporting it with evidence. In fact, when it came to TDAs, we used a method that heavily connected to Science writing CER- Claims, Evidence and Reasoning. Argumentative writing is another great way to connect Science and Social Studies, by having them state claims, support with evidence and examining counterclaims. Argumentative essays were used in a research study on for a critical needs Social Studies classroom where they taught students how to read and think like historians and then argue their claim. For math, have students explain their reasonings and thinking when answering math questions, is a great way to help with written expression.
As for reading, there are a multitude of strategies that I have seen content area teachers use at my school along with countless articles I have read supporting the various ways. Annotations are a great way for students reading any Social Studies or Science content article or document, to express their thinking. The same can be said about math, when they annotate word problems. Close reads are another way to reinforce concepts learned by reexamining and rereading articles several times for comprehension. Reading strategies can range from main idea, to cause and affect to understanding of the usage of text structures and features to convey an author's intent. As long as disciplinary literacy is used, every content area can benefit along with enchaining student content knowledge and ability to comprehend, synthesize and analyze the content.

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There are so many opportunities to use reading and writing through a disciplinary literacy stance. Using the "Think Aloud" strategy to help students understand how to process important information and/or ask critical questions is something I often use. Another great strategy is teaching students to use graphic organizers to record and organize important information and concepts from the texts they are reading. Students could do this independently or in a group setting. Also, Marzano's 6-step method for teaching vocabulary is another way to incorporate reading and writing within a discipline while building their individual word banks. Finally, I LOVE to use the 3-2-1 strategy and the WIN strategy. 3-2-1 is a great way for students to identify new learning while also thinking about what they are still wondering about. The WIN strategy is perfect for building their summarizing skills when reading and processing non-fiction. These are only a few of the ways we can incorporate reading and writing throughout our content areas. Reading and writing is a critical part of every subject we teach and success comes from teaching students different strategies for reading different genres for different reasons.

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As our STEM coordinator, I am primarily responsible for helping to plan and co-teach in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math--which would seem like I miss out when it comes to reading and writing. But the reality is that it's really impossible to effectively teach any aspect of STEM without literacy. Great, inquiry-inspiring texts are often the first step in any project or activity I create, and it's my goal to constantly have students reading and writing like scientists (or engineers, mathematicians, historians, etc.) throughout a STEM experience. I'm also fortunate to work closely with our amazing literacy coach on most of our big projects, so that helps to make sure that no matter what our kids are doing, they are engaging with some type of text, using it to help themselves accomplish a challenge, and writing to reflect and share their learning along the way. Literacy is in everything we do, and we are more engaged and successful in all content areas because of that!

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I provide my student many opportunities to practice reading and writing throughout the day in all disciplines. Reading and writing are not solely done in those subjects. My students write in science, social studies, and math! In math, I will have my students complete a math journal prompt, where many times, they have to use words to explain how they solved a problem. This allows me to see if they really grasp a concept and for them to experience how mathematicians share their thinking with others. One of my favorite, and my student's favorite, project we completed this year was our 'Witness' writings based on the Revolutionary War. After reading numerous articles and videos about all the events leading up to, during, and after the Revolutionary War, the students got to choose one item and write from that item's perspective about one event during this time period. This provided reading mini-lessons on perspective and author's craft, while having to incorporate historically accurate facts in history. Giving students choice in their item and event during the war allowed them to become more engaged and excited in their reading, writing, and history.

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I try to incorporate reading and writing as much as I can especially in my reading groups. Depending on the topic of the week, I look for leveled readers that the students can read. Once the books are chosen based on their levels, I search through the book and make vocabulary cards to help them understand the story on that first day. We continue to review the vocabulary words, because this helps them read more fluently during the rest of the week. For example, this week students learned about maps. So I found books on their level about maps and made a plan for the whole week with different strategies that they could use for reading and writing. Then I use a checklist and provide feedback on their work. If the following requirements are met, the students will have a chance to color in their strategy box and place their work in their data notebook for evidence.

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I try to incorporate reading and writing across the disciplines as much as I can. During our reading groups I try to find books from Reading A-Z that relate to our Science or SS topic for the week. In writing, I use the writing standards and have the students write about the Science or SS topic for the week. For example, we are working on an opinion unit for writing. I have students write about their opinion on the weather, seasons, and what is the best activity to do in each season to incorporate our weather unit into our writing.

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Teaching at a STEAM school, we provide our students with multiple opportunities to engage in meaningful literacy experiences through integration of the disciplines. We teach science and social studies standards by providing students with opportunities to read and write about these various topics of study. Using many different types of texts provide students with useful knowledge about the topic while learning about different genres and types of literature. For example, after Spring Break we will begin learning about oviparous animals. Within this unit we will read many fiction and nonfiction stories. By using these texts, students will learn about narrative writing versus informational writing and the difference between these two. We will also provide many emergent reader books for students to practice their reading skills, but the topic will be about oviparous animals - a topic which they are interested in. Providing students with these texts gives them ownership in their learning as they are making choices about what they are reading, which increases engagement and interest levels of students fostering a positive attitude towards reading and learning.

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My understanding of disciplinary literacy is that it is not simply reading books on a social studies or science topic or writing on these topics.  It is teaching students how to approach these texts as a scientist would or a historian would.  It is important for students to understand that reading a nonfiction text is very different from reading a fiction text.  The same applies to poetry, articles, websites, blogs, etc.  I think text sets are an important step in providing students with content area reading and writing.  However, these text sets need to offer all different types of texts and we need to be diligent in modeling and teaching how to read them and how we can model our writing after them.

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A big goal for our school is to integrate science and social studies content into our literacy block. One of the best ways to do this, in my opinion, is through text sets. When students learn through a series of texts (multiple genres) their learning becomes purposeful and meaningful. When our understanding of a subject is strong, we are able to write with greater details and read through the lens of multiple perspectives.

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My co-teacher and I are planning to expand our K5 students' use of strategies for engagement to the Science Unit on  weather as we conclude this series of lessons. We will use a text set addressing the learning standards on this topic, but apply the strategies  - e.g. looking for treasure, and self -monitoring attention while reading the books to learn the Science content.

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We try to incorporate as much Science and Social Studies as we can into our lessons since a lot of times when we pull students they are missing these content areas. For example, we read books such as the I Survived Series, Scholastic articles, and other resources that address the Science and Social Studies content standards. This helps the students not get behind in these areas while also working on the content vocabulary that can be so difficult for these two subjects. We have three different groups set up in our classroom to address reading and writing. We have one group focused on reading, one focused on writing, and one focused on vocabulary. All of these groups are planned around a text or text set that addresses a SS standard or Science standard. Hopefully from working on these standards in small groups the students transfer their knowledge to the regular classroom.