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This year will be my first year teaching 5th grade social studies, reading, and English. As an English and reading teacher, I will be doing a variety of activities that promote literacy skills - essays, read alongs, non-fiction article readings, etc. Another aspect of English that helps form literacy skills is learning parts of speech. Students must understand the parts of speech in order to form a complete thought. So, instead of just lecturing and assigning practice work, I will also try to incorporate books about the different parts of speech. Click here to see a collection of books that could be used. Students love picture books, and this is a great way to reinforce literacy skills. I also plan on using books to reinforce figurative language skills. Students always see examples on assignments and worksheets, but they never see figurative language in an actual text.
Social studies is new subject for me this year. Social studies is a content area that allows for teachers to easily incorporate literacy skills. I will be teaching a unit on Native Americans. I plan on reading a variety of informative articles as well as picture books. Click here to see a collection of books that could be used. I will also be using a variety of writing prompts, and I am thinking I might have students write a story acting as a historical figure we cover. In addition, students will be reading and creating a wiki about one the fifty states. One of the required parts of the wiki is a persuasive paragraph convincing me to visit their state. This not only allows students to practice writing non-fiction but also writing using persuasion. I am still planning and getting adjusted with my new material, so if you have any new ideas, please let me know!
Social Studies does seem to lend itself easily to incorporating literacy! A lot of times when we see kids that struggle with reading, they *really* struggle with reading informational text ... and Social Studies will be a great way to help them gain experience with informational texts! I think you'll also be able to incorporate technology literacy, too .... I'm sure there are lots of times when students could research via the internet, watch videos, create digital stories, etc.!
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas. For the past two years My first grade team and I have done research projects on famous Americans during our writing and social studies times around presidents day. I think that would be a great way for you to incorporate reading and writing in your social studies block. I helped my first graders a lot with the research by checking out books from the library for our class and setting up a Google Custom Search for them to use which only let them search websites that I previewed and made sure they were safe. They learned a great deal about George Washington and Abe Lincoln and had a blast doing it. They got so share their projects with the other first grade classrooms and we also invited parents in for the presentations. I'm sure that fifth graders could take that to a whole new level.
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