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Integrating language arts skills into social studies can be tricky. There is already a lot of subject matter to cover without having to teach reading and writing skills as well! If a social studies teacher did not receive much language arts training within his or her certification program, integrating these skills can be even more difficult. However, within the Common Core framework, social studies teachers are expected to integrate reading and writing skills. In addition, it can be difficult to know which skills students need. The good news is many social studies teachers already use some of the most important reading skills. Adding reading to your social studies lessons may not be as difficult as it may seem.

In this post, I am going to discuss six key reading skills that will build literacy within a social studies classroom.

1. Vocab and Vernacularisms

For many students, a poor vocabulary really holds them back from a deep understanding of social studies content. Students with processing issues or dyslexia have a difficult time sounding out words or breaking them apart, so reading large chunks of text can be overwhelming. Knowing the vocabulary words before reading can make the textbook or documents less intimidating. The more teachers can do to make new words memorable, the better.

One way to tackle vocabulary is to encourage students to use new terms. The more they see and use a word, the better chance they have of remembering it. Students should be expected to use vocabulary words in their writing (but also be allowed to use their notes while they are still learning the words.)

Another strategy is to connect new words to other words or to a mnemonic devices. For example, any time I have a vocab word with a common Greek or Latin root, I take a minute to point out the root, its meaning, and other words in that family. For example,

can be related to so many other words. Many students have studied Spanish and can see that aqueduct is similar to

(water). It also looks a lot like

- the color of water. An

is a water tank for fish. So an aqueduct probably has something to do with water. Giving students multiple connections to other words will help them retain and recall the new word.

An example of a mnemonic device is something like latitude is a ladder. Now, that one never really worked for me - neither does lat is fat - but I have had many students that used it. Personally, I always teach that latitude has an A for Around, while longitude has an O for Over.

In addition, vernacularisms are important to understand primary documents. Students need to understand the language of a time period in order to really comprehend the stated and implied meanings in a document. Teachers could identify any words or sayings in a social studies text that might affect student comprehension and preteach their meanings.

2. Identifying Bias and Propaganda

Being able to determine if information is based on fact or is biased has become even more important in the digital age. Tech-savvy groups are getting better at making emails and websites that really look legitimate!

Although propaganda and bias are not new, they have recently been brought to the forefront in many classes. When studying history, students can examine propaganda or analyze documents and drawings for bias. At the same time, students also need to learn how to consume information digitally, including how to tell whether or not the site author has a bias.

Social studies teachers could coordinate these lessons with the English department. For example, English teachers could perhaps cover identifying bias, propaganda, and fake news from modern sources, while the social studies teachers could weave it into their historical discussions. As this skill is cross-disciplinary, teachers should make sure they are not unnecessarily duplicating content.

GCF LearnFree.org has a some excellent digital lessons available for free, including How to Judge Online Information and Evaluating a Webpage.

If you are looking for lesson on Fake News, Angie Kratzer sells a unit on TPT.

3. Close Reading

Over the past few years, close reading has been given a lot of attention in upper elementary grades. In close reading, students are really determining the main idea and key details, as well as reacting to the text. Students are taught that multiple readings are required to truly comprehend the text. Of course, without specific instructions, you and I both know many students will read the text one time and keep on going!

Social studies teachers can easily continue to model this in older grades as texts become increasingly complex. It sounds like a lot of extra instruction, but many teachers may already be doing this. For example, if the class is reading and analyze a document or passage, teachers can simply "think aloud." In other words, the teacher can show how he or she understood a chunk of the text saying out loud the thinking process. (If you are like me, you already talk to yourself when thinking through something, so you just need to say it louder!)

Another part of close reading is taking notes in the margins. I know many teachers already do this on copies of documents, so just modeling this to students will help integrate this skill.

For more information on close reading, here are two well-written articles on using the strategy:

4. Author's Purpose

Author's Purpose is especially important in social studies. As students read and analyze historical documents, political cartoons, posters, diaries, etc, they need to determine the author's purpose in creating the piece. Did the author want to persuade or inform the reader? Is the author simply entertaining or describing something to the reader? Understanding the author's intent of a piece may affect how the text or image is interpreted.

Students should come to middle school with a good understanding of the types of author's purpose. By sixth grade, this is

a new skill. Social studies teachers may need to do a basic review of the types of author's purpose, but really, teachers just should try to make a point to ask and explore author's purpose when examining historical texts or images.

5. Cause & Effect

Although students have studied cause and effect multiple times before middle school, this is a skill social studies teachers should continue to review. When students begin learning this skill, they only have one cause and one effect. By fifth and sixth grade, they will begin to see multiple causes or multiple effects. However, historical events often have multiple causes

multiple effects - which can be much more difficult for students to understand. (Keep in mind that many students confuse which things are causes and which are effects.)

Using graphic organizers may help students understand more complex relationships. Some students will start to see the "big picture" of the content with a visual organizer. Teachers can just add a cause and effect graphic organizer to their note-taking system to help students comprehend the cause and effect relationships.

Within PowerPoint, there are a few graphic organizers in the SmartArt section. SmartArt can be found on the Insert tab. To find cause and effect, click SmartArt and then Relationships. Once selected, you can add or subtract pieces to fit your needs.

6. Historical Perspective
Historical perspective
has been defined as "attempting to see through the eyes of the people who lived in times and circumstances far removed from our present-day lives." ( Seixas and Morton 2013) As social studies teachers, we need to teach students to understand historical perspective. For many students, this may be a new concept.

If you teach upper elementary or middle school, you have probably had students declare a past action to be "wrong" or 'racist". This is called
presentism
, or looking at history from a modern day perspective. From a modern point of view, the beliefs, values, and practices of the past may indeed be considered wrong. However, what students need to ask themselves is how would people of the time period interpret the event? By interpreting events in the context of the time period, students will have a better understanding of how the event, document, etc. would have been interpreted by and affected people.

Teachers can introduce students to the time period they are studying with images, quotes, songs, or other cultural artifacts. Using these items as bell ringers can help give students a better understanding of the time period. Discussing the culture and values of a time period will help students form a deeper understanding of the past.

The Historical Thinking Project, based on Seixas and Morton's The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, has a good description of historical perspective, as well as teacher resources.

Teachers can also find resources on the Digital Chalkboard, created by the California Department of Education.

I hope these explanations and tips have been helpful. If you are a social studies trying to integrate reading skills, don't despair! It seems really overwhelming at first, but there are so many things social studies teachers do that already support reading. Start with one reading skill at a time. Integrate it in a few lessons, and keep doing it until you are comfortable with it. Once that skill becomes a normal part of your routine, add another. Before you know it, you will be seamlessly integrating reading into your content lessons!

Do you have questions? Need help? I would be glad to help! You can reach me by email or just leave a comment.

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6 Reading Strategies You Need to Teach Social Studies - TeachingIdeas4U

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Integrating language arts skills into social studies can be tricky. There is already a lot of subject matter to cover without having to teach reading and writing skills as well! If a social studies teacher did not receive much language arts training within his or her certification program,

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Are your students getting enough practice in skills beyond just listening to lectures? Speaking, writing, and reading are three key content areas of the literacy curriculum that must be addressed in school. In this article, we'll take a look at how important it is to teach literacy in all content areas.

But first, we should probably define what "literacy" means. Not so long ago, literacy was interpreted as having reading and writing skills. Lessons focused primarily on these two essential skills. However, that has since changed; students are now expected to engage in and understand advanced writing, reading, speaking, and listening, turning two key areas into four. Each of those areas should receive equal weight in the classroom if students are to reach an advanced level that allows them to fully participate in lessons and excel in a range of subjects.

Fitting literacy into every lesson

Even now some teachers think that teaching literacy remains the responsibility of language arts professionals. However, this is by no means the case. History, math, art, and science teachers are all equally responsible for incorporating all four literacy areas in their lectures. There's no such thing as literacy only in the context of the arts - it's a universal skill that's important in all subjects.

Young people who are growing up today are probably going to write and read more than adults at any time in history. While the bulk of their reading may involve social media posts, they'll still need strong literacy skills to sift through the noise and process the information they read online. Moreover, they'll still require an advanced level of literacy in order to work, run a household, perform their role as a citizen, and manage their personal life. It stands to reason that every educational professional that a student comes into contact with has a role in helping them to reach that standard so they can live a full and successful life.

It's all too easy for teachers to focus solely on the content that they teach. There is a lot of pressure to cover a significant amount of material these days. There's a lot of knowledge to impart to students before the end of the semester, usually for exams. But are students getting sufficient time in school every day to practice their vital communication skills?

Content may be what is taught, but we also need to look at how content is being taught. This is an area where we need to consider literacy instruction. There are a surprising number of effective and engaging strategies that you can employ to get your students to write, think, talk, and read about the content you're delivering. The overall goal of teaching literacy is to build up students' writing skills and overall communicative abilities.

As a teacher, you need to take a second look at how you're conveying knowledge and information to your students. Are you falling back on teacher talk or lecturing, or are you giving your students multiple opportunities to glean information by themselves?

4 skills you can develop through teaching literacy in all content areas

1. Developing speaking skills

Students having high-level or academic conversations in large or small group settings isn't something that's going to happen overnight, especially if all they do is take notes as you lecture them in class. It'll take time and teacher support to create this sort of setting in any classroom.

If students are to engage effectively in an academic conversation, they must have sufficient practice in sharing information with their peers in groups of three or two. Strategies such as shoulder share, chunk and chew, elbow partner, or think-pair-share are all helpful in this respect.

Learning is a social act. For every five minutes of teacher talk you deliver, give your students a couple of minutes during which they can talk together. Of course, you should be walking around the classroom and listening to what they're saying. This gives you the opportunity to informally assess their knowledge and check their understanding, as well as to ensure that the discussions going on are actually relevant to the course material.

Conversation is a vital tool in processing new concepts and content. It's also a useful way to help students come up with ideas to share in class.

2. Developing writing skills

In the same way as conversation improves understanding, writing can help students to make more sense of the subject that they're learning and relate new ideas to their own lives. After all, it's impossible to avoid thinking if you're writing!

Your students should be writing each day and in each lesson. You should add this into your lesson delivery in the form of fun and information writing activities such as stop and jots, quick writes, one-minute essays, or graffiti conversations. Keep in mind that not every writing assignment has to be a formal one.

3. Developing reading skills

Teachers were once working under the belief that they could hand a novel or informational text to students and assume that they could understand it completely by themselves. Those days are long gone. Today, whether teachers like it or not, we are all required to be reading instructors regardless of what subjects we teach.

Teachers can scaffold reading through the use of some particularly effective strategies. These can be employed before, during, and after reading. Strategies such as reading for a purpose, previewing text, making connections and predictions, using graphic organizers, or engaging in think-alouds can all support students - including those who are struggling or learning English as a second language.

One way to develop students' reading skills is to set up a mini "library" of books in your class from a number of genres and reading levels. Allow your students to select books from this shelf during independent reading time. Alternatively, in classes such as science or math, you may be able to include copies of different textbooks. That way, if students are unable to understand an author's explanations, they can consult a different book for a better understanding.

Additionally, note that every classroom, regardless of subject, can contain fiction and nonfiction books, magazines, and newspapers as part of the assigned reading. Students who are exposed to a wider variety of literature are able to broaden their knowledge and develop stronger literacy skills.

4. Developing listening skills

Listening is the fourth key skill area of literacy, but it's the one that needs the least focus in today's classroom. Whatever the subject you teach, chances are that you spend a considerable amount of time in every lesson talking and imparting knowledge to your students. Even if your students aren't always listening, they still have ample experience with listening to lectures and practice this skill on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, it's possible to enhance their experience by encouraging them to listen more to each other. Ask students to listen to other students sharing their work and then review it using precise examples. This works well in a range of subjects. Whether listening to another student's composition in music, their solution to a problem in math, or their findings after conducting a scientific experiment, students will need to pay attention in order to give an informed opinion.

Refining students' literacy skills

It's more important than ever for students to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills for 21st-century literacy. Mastering literacy is an important endeavor that's not restricted to any single subject. Everyone reads, regardless of what work they do. Help your students to see the value in literacy, and they'll be just as passionate about it as you are.
Photo: Google Edu

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How important is teaching literacy in all content areas? - Classcraft Blog

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Everyone reads. Help your students to see the value in practicing reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills to master 21st-century literacy.

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How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas?

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Students do plenty of listening in our classes, but what about reading, writing, and speaking?

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importance of reading in all subjects - - Video Search Results

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