Literacy in Other Content Areas

In my classroom, I incorporate literacy into every content area. It isn’t always easy, but I feel as if it will help my students be more well-rounded adults in the future. Not only will integrating literacy help them into adulthood, but it also saves me time. At the elementary level, we are expected to teach so many things in such a short amount of time. The students are at school for 7 hours each day. One hour of that seven hour day is spent at specials, thirty minutes at lunch, and another thirty minutes at recess. When you add in the transition times, bathroom breaks, the time it takes to unpack and do lunch count and then pack up at the end of the day, that leaves about 4.5 hours left for instruction. That isn’t a lot of time to fit in reading, grammar, writing, spelling, vocabulary, math, science, social studies, handwriting, technology, and all of the other things we are asked to teach our students. This is why integrating literacy into other content areas is so important.

Obviously, my literacy block is full of literacy. This is primarily when my reading instruction occurs and students work in literacy stations (vocabulary, spelling, handwriting, grammar skills, reading skills). In my math block, I have my students take notes for each new math lesson, which is almost every day. This note taking has students practicing handwriting skills as well as note taking skills, which is important when reading and writing about nonfiction texts. Learning to write down the most important ideas and facts will help them with nonfiction reading in the future and in our classroom. The other subject I teach is science, and I use reading, writing, and vocabulary during my science class with my students. Each quarter students have vocab words that go along with our science unit for that quarter. Students practice these words all quarter long using digital tools such as Quizlet and Kahoot. We also spend a lot of time in nonfiction texts learning about our topics. Instead of me doing all of the teaching, I like using science as a more investigative approach and having kids research the most important things. For example, our fourth quarter unit in science is matter. I give the kids that topic and the vocab words, and have them use resources to find what they think is important about the topic. Then, they write about what they have found or present their information to their class in another way, such as Google Slides. I’ve found that incorporating literacy in all of these ways allows me to meet all of my standards with the limited amount of instructional time I am given.