Final Synthesis Blog

me before taking this class

When I first registered for classes this fall and saw that I had to take this class, I had no idea what it really was. I had no idea what content area literacy was, and my first impression was that this was going to be a writing course for me. I wasn’t excited about this class because I purposely chose math and science as my subjects to avoid reading and writing. However, my mindset has changed over the course of the semester by just learning about what content literacy is and seeing how much literacy strategies can help improve reading in my content areas. 

As much as I dislike reading and writing it is necessary to do sometimes in both math and science. I’ve had teachers in the past assign textbook readings as homework, which seems like a simple task, but has been difficult. Science and math textbooks are written differently than what we’re used to reading. In our Subject Matters textbook, they talk about this and how informed readers read those texts differently. Personally, I don’t think I would want to assign textbook readings, but I think exposing students to scientific articles and research papers is important. Before I would ever make my future students read them, I would teach them how to read them. I want to do this by doing a think aloud, most likely on the topic of evaluating or analyzing. I would also teach them the structure of the articles and papers so they know how to navigate through them and get the information they need. 

Throughout the semester, we’ve been learning about different strategies to help build content area literacy. The one I think has been the most impactful are think alouds. I like that the think alouds really showcase how to read and emphasize the necessary skills. This is so beneficial to struggling readers because as a teacher you literally get to model and show them what they need to do to help them understand what they are reading. A think aloud I would want to do in my future classroom is one where I read a word problem and focus on evaluating as my skill. I think this would be really beneficial to students because in school were always going to have tests, and standardize tests like to try and trick students with unnecessary information. By doing this kind of think aloud, I think this will really help students pick out the necessary information needed to solve a word problem. This think aloud is something I can do in both a science and math class. 

Another strategy I really liked was frontloading with images. I really like using this because it’s an interesting start to get students interested and engaged with the text. Using this strategy also allows students to use their inferring skills to try and figure out what the text will be about. This strategy also helps build connection skills because students are trying to connect these images to what they will be learning and once they start reading the text, they will start thinking back to those images and make the connections they couldn’t see before. I will definitely be using this strategy in both math and science classes because there is a lot of versatility in using this strategy. Overall, I’m thankful to have taken this course and to have learned the importance of content area literacy and how to build reading skills. I feel prepared to include reading content in my future classrooms, whether I teach math or science, and I will definitely have my Subjects Matter book with me so I’ll always have strategies and the other resources on hand. (614)

Art and Content Area Literacy

When visiting the Georgia Museum of Art, I found a painting I really liked that nicely captures both science and art. The painting is called Galapagos II by Rebecca Rutstein. The story behind her painting was that she was on board a ship traveling from the Galapagos Islands to southern California, and during the trip the boat was trailing a hurricane she created this painting. She poured paint on the canvas and let the ships movement do the work, and she worked with scientist who mapped the ocean floor with sonar technology and put the data in her painting.

This would be a good painting to incorporate into my classroom when learning about the ocean. It has actual data from sonar technology from the oceans floor so this could be a good introduction for a section about ocean geography. Also, I could have the students do an assignment similar to how this painting was created and have them pour paint on a canvas and move the canvas around in motions like the ocean rocking the ship and then they can incorporate some scientific data on after. For example, they could also do sonar technology data of the ocean floor, or migration patterns of whales. (203)

Book Clubs

Before doing book clubs in our class, I had never participated in a book club. To be completely honest, I thought that only sophisticated old ladies participated in book clubs. All of my teachers growing stuck to the whole class reading the same book, but these book clubs aren’t too different from that. We still get the good discussions and reflections, but I like the book clubs because they’re smaller and each club gets to read a different book. I think book clubs would be a good thing to incorporate in all classrooms, not just language arts. 

The book my book club is reading is Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet, and I think this book would be good for middle school math classes, most likely 6^th grade. It introduces topics about patterns and geometry and it also is interesting to read and not all about math, so kids will like it. Unfortunately, I think there would be some difficulties to be able to implement book clubs in the curriculum. It would be hard to make time for them because the curriculum is so structured and there is already not enough time to squeeze all the material in the school year. I think that doing a book club would be better as an extra credit project. (215)