Literacy Across the Curriculum by Abby Horning by

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 02:06:32 UTC

Literacy and learning how to read simple children’s books and information texts, to tackling complex novels and passages, demands students to expand their palettes. To be a teacher who is committed to continually building their students’ reading abilities by not stopping at the familiar and safe levels, but guiding them to challenging and unchartered territories that literature has served on a silver platter. Reading is not a mere escape, but a way for our students to enjoy the powerful energy that words can provide and influence. Strengthening one’s literacy requires the devotion to test limits and overcome them with a hunger for more. Teaching reading to students is a particularly noble act and craft because it is the gateway to unlocking their unique voices, choices, stories, and they all have within them. We are storytellers. To teach students how to read, comprehend, and truly appreciate others’ stories through the written word is an essential tool that opens them to a continuous stream of knowledge, fosters their intellectual growth, and always keeps them engaged with the ever-changing world around them. This act of nurturing literacy is foundational in shaping informed, articulate, and inventive scholars who can contribute thoughtfully to society and the learning community of our classroom.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 02:39:45 UTC

S is for Standards: What content-specific standards do I want to target? What key understandings do I want students to develop? What content-specific knowledge or skills will they need to acquire?

T is for Texts: When selecting texts, be creative and consider options in addition to the textbook. Can you find opportunities to incorporate primary texts? Up-to-date online content? High-interest readings? How about multimedia, video, or visual resources?

A is for Assessment: Well-designed assessments will require students to demonstrate a deep understanding of what they’ve read and learned (e.g., by explaining, evaluating, applying, or expressing an opinion). Assessments should also test students’ command of the reading and literacy skills you choose to target.

R is for Reading and Literacy Skills: Target specific literacy skills in your lesson. These can be reading, writing, speaking, listening, or language skills. You can also pick skills that will help students demonstrate their learning either orally or in writing—skills like writing a well-organized paragraph, supporting a position with evidence, or summarizing, better yet, contextualizing (annotating) a passage from a text.

T is for Tools: Look for instructional tools and strategies that will help students develop the literacy skills you identified and deepen their understanding of the content.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 02:53:12 UTC

To be a "reading teacher," I must challenge myself and my young scholars to deeper thinking and critical/cultural consciousness by teaching them to not unquestionably accept everything they read or hear, but to respectfully question everything. Whether we are talking about last night's assigned reading of a novel, discussing how we approached and tackled a complex math word problem, sharing the outline we crafted for our scientific method for our science projects, or our interpretation of a DBQ of a historical piece of writing or propaganda. Whatever the content-specific discussion is centered around, Socratic Seminars are where literacy is expanded, developed, and challenged. These magical discussions are where diverse contributions are accepted and critiqued, not just a simple, blatant, "correct" response. I loved Socratic Seminar-style discussions in elementary school, all the way through college. My "reading" teachers KNEW how important student-led dialogue is to understanding, learning, comprehending, thinking about one's thinking, and inquiring!

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:00:00 UTC

Set your goal or vision for making reading, writing, listening, and speaking a keystone of your daily teaching practices in all content areas!

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:06:34 UTC

One of my favorite quote by short story writer, Alice Munro:

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:12:06 UTC

A Writing Piece of Mine, that illustrates the power of literature can have on a young mind, when they have a true "reading teacher" who has a blazing passion for literacy knowledge, but also something much more than that, they have a desire and a need to go deeper, in both reading and writing.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:21:20 UTC

Faulkner is our Shakespeare. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner threw me directly into a world of nitty-gritty, harsh realism. His eloquence with language is like nothing I have ever experienced before. His style consists of sentences that are merely streams of consciousness that contain no periods, punctuation, or capitalization. Also, he goes on without noting when he is switching character, place, or even time. All these things come together to enhance both character and plot. What seems like absurd writing, is actually the characters’ thoughts - it is Faulkner’s way of showing us the character’s self. In this novel, there are four sections and each section is through the eyes and mind of one of the four major characters. Besides the first section, the rest focuses on the Easter weekend of 1928. There are so many concepts and characters that I could discuss; however, Benjy Compson is the character that made my heart ache the most. Benjy is a mentally challenged, thirty-three year old, bear-like man who is nothing but loving and affectionate. He has the intelligence of a three year old and is not able to speak, but bellows and moans instead. His family sees him as a curse and treats him as such. The thing that is so heart wrenching about his character is that we, the readers, know him as a person, but his family and everybody else does not. We see his grace, kindness, and innocence. We see through his eyes - his observations of his surroundings as simple yet poetically beautiful. We also see his pain and longing for his sister that he misses dearly. It is the story of a broken family. With the closing scene of the novel order is stored, but no resolutions are made. Order is not always restored or remains intact for it will never stop being disturbed because we, the characters of this story called life, have the reins. We have control and we abuse this power. In this exquisite novel, you see that the people who should have the upper hand do not, and the kind ones are seen as curses, and the cruel ones are praised. I fell in love with Faulkner’s writing for he is linguistically stunning, but profoundly tragic. If it was not for my English teacher, Mrs. Bickford, I would not have absorbed all the wonders Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury have offered to the world. Through critical analysis and excerpt dissections I dove deeper than the words on the page. I dove to the work’s depths and emerged from it knowing those characters inside and out - knowing the workings of both their souls and minds. This was an empowering moment for me because this novel helped me learn more about my abilities as a reader and a scholar.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:29:34 UTC

We do not want our students to simply regurgitate what we have taught or the words on the page, but want them to grow into inventive writers and critical readers who produce new and fruitful ideas. Before students can fully digest learned materials, teachers need to give them an opportunity to pause, graze, process what they have learned, and chew it well, and break it down. This process leads students to invention. It is a vital part of the writing process that leads to choices, creativity, critical thinking, and endless possibilities to consider. Invention triggers an appetite, a hunger, for more chances to mature their literacy and rhetorical writing skills.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 03:30:55 UTC

Our aspiration and responsibility as 21st-century educators of young scholars is to spark and fuel a blazing zeal for reading, writing, and speaking and an undeniable want to grow in those skill areas. This requires us to start with teaching the foundational skills of how to recognize letters and sound out letters, syllables, words, and concepts of print. Then guide, mentor, and model — through interactive read-alouds and active back-and-forth dialog while reading — and encourage higher-order reading skills, like close reading, inferencing, meaning-making/comprehension-monitoring processes, and critical analysis. The nobility comes into play, when one teaches their students to read, write, and speak by blending dedication, empathy, and integrity and is driven by the fundamental belief that literacy is not just a skill, but a gateway to lifelong learning and personal empowerment to be able to navigate the world — and the world of literature — with unyielding confidence, curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity!

Annotations, Contextualizing, and Close (re-)Reading.

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 04:04:52 UTC

Comprehension and literacy supports during instructional activities (in all content areas in school) can be as simple as the use of whole-class, small-group, and partner close-read alouds (re-reading content-specific texts, excerpts, or even word problems) to help students progress in their language proficiency/skills in the areas of content-specific vocabulary knowledge, grammar, sentence structure, and strong comprehension skills in speaking, reading, writing, and listening. As they read and listen, they will be encouraged to annotate the text: circling important information or starring main ideas, questions they have about certain underlined parts, and notes in the margins (reader's personal thought: real-life connections, predictions, favorite quotes, interpretations).

abbyhorning242 — 2024-12-01 04:06:27 UTC