Chapter 12: Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum

Text Sets: Teachers collect text sets of books and other reading materials on topics to use in teaching thematic units. Materials for text sets are carefully chosen to include different genres, a range of reading level to meet the needs of students, and multimedia resources that present a variety of perspectives. 

Trade books: trade books are books published by a commercial publisher and intended for general readership. These books are both entertaining and informative, and the authors’ engaging writing styles and formats keep readers interested. 

Mentor Texts: Teachers use stories, nonfiction books, and poems that students are familiar with to model the writer’s craft. Picture books are especially useful mentor texts because they’re short enough to be reread quickly. Teachers begin by rereading a mentor text and pointing out a specific feature such as adding punch with strong verbs, writing from a different perspective, or changing the tone by placing adjectives after nouns. 

Learning Logs: Students use learning logs to record and react to what they’ve learning in social studies, science, or other content areas. Learning logs are “a place to think on paper.” Students write in these journals to discover gaps in their knowledge and to explore relationships between what they’re learning and their past experiences. 

Double-Entry Journals: these are just what the name suggests: Students divide their journal pages into two parts and write different types of information in each one. In a double entry journal, in the left column the student could write information he was learning and in the right column he could ask questions and make personal connections to the information. 

Quickwriting: When students do quick writing, they write on a topic for 5 to 10 minutes, letting thoughts flow form their minds to their pens without focusing on mechanics or revisions. 

Essays: 

Collaborative books: students work together to write collaborative books. Sometimes students each write one page for the report, or they can work together in small groups to write chapters. Students create collaborative reports on almost any science or social studies topic. 

KWL charts: KWL chart is a graphic organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students, in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. 

Anticipation guides: In anticipation guides, teachers introduce a set of statements on the topic of the chapter, students agree or disagree with each statement, and then they read the assignment to see if they were right. 

Prereading plan: Teachers introduce the big ideas in a chapter when they create a prereading plan in which they present an idea discussed in the chapter and then have students brainstorm words and ideas related to it. 

Question-Answer Relationships: Sometimes students turn the main headings into questions and prepare to read to find the answers to the questions or check the questions at the end of the chapter to determine the question-answer-relationships. 

Stages of reading process:  

Semantic feature analysis: To focus on the big ideas, students make data charts to record information according to the big ideas or create a semantic feature analysis chart to classify important information. 

Word sorts: students do word sorts to emphasize the relationships among the big ideas.  Word sorts focuses students’ attention on critical features of words, namely sound, pattern, and meaning. 

SQ4R study strategy: 

Classroom application: This chapter has showed and taught me that in order to be an effective teacher, we must integrate reading and writing instruction with content area study. Thematic units and minilessons should be taught to ensure that students learn how to comprehend nonfictions books and content area textbooks. In my future classroom, a goal of mine is to integrate reading and writing instruction in all content areas. For example, I would like to have my future students read a nonfiction science book and then create a poster board of what they learned in their text and then share their poster board to the class!