Jessica Fries-Gaither's List: Reading for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects

In this series of lessons, students read newspaper articles obtained from newspaper websites. Students then identify journalism's "5 Ws and 1 H" (who, what, when, where, why, and how) and complete a template with the corresponding information they have found in the article. Finally, students use their notes to write a 20-word summary called a gist. Once students have mastered writing a gist using newspaper articles, the strategy is then applied to content area texts to support comprehension and summarizing skills.

From segregated schools in Alabama to a prestigious position and home in Chicago, this interactive slideshow adapted from NOVA follows the life and career of renowned 20th century chemist Percy Julian, who gained international recognition in chemistry despite the tremendous educational and social obstacles that African Americans faced. Discussion questions require students to cite evidence from the slideshow.

In this media-rich lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, an early astronaut's experiences teach students that Newton's third law of motion—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—applies both on Earth and in outer space. Some components of the interactive lesson require students to highlight portions of text that provide information about a given topic.

This video describes how a middle school science teacher integrates literacy into his science instruction by having students read, summarize, and discuss current science events. Students also write "Science Tweets." A downloadable lesson plan is available.

In this lesson, students use the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach to understand new vocabulary prior to reading. This approach provides a means of preteaching by using oral language activities and vocabulary words as a basis for predicting what might happen in a nonfiction reading selection. The VLP approach also aids in the structural analysis and morphology of words. Using identified vocabulary, students record synonyms, antonyms, categorization, dictionary usage, semantic analysis, part of speech, phonics analysis, structural analysis, and rhyming words. Once students complete the word study, they make predictions based on teacher-created questions related to the content. After reading the selection, students modify their predictions based on their reading and complete a crossword puzzle based on the vocabulary and word study. The VLP approach can be used in all content areas.

Students are engaged and motivated to build content area vocabulary through the creation of ABC books. A small-group activity introduces a variety of ABC books, including books for older readers that use the letters of the alphabet as a starting point to present information about a featured subject. Students then decide on a style and structure for their own alphabet books and choose a word for each letter from content area textbooks, encyclopedias, reference books, or suggested websites. A storyboard is constructed including each of the 26 words, the context in which it will appear, and a quick sketch of the proposed illustration. Students' final ABC books are created using either the interactive Alphabet Organizer or PowerPoint.

Middle school students love friendly competition, and word games can be an ideal context to help them study the meaning, structure, and spelling of words. In this lesson, students practice analyzing word meanings by learning root words and affixes. They work in a variety of ways with a list of about 20 common but challenging words to learn the definition and spelling of each. Then they get in small groups to design and play the Make-a-Word card game, during which they must form complete words with three cards: a prefix, a root word, and a suffix.

Students investigate picture books organized in comparison/contrast structures to discover methods of organization (usually a combination of the point-by-point, whole-to-whole, or similarities-to-differences patterns) and the ways authors use transitions to guide readers. Students can then decide what organizational patterns and transitional words work best to accomplish their individual purposes in writing and apply those to their papers.

This lesson is designed to be used during a unit when students are writing a comparison/contrast paper. It will be most helpful prior to drafting, but it could also be useful during revision.

The Flip-a-Chip activity turns ordinary poker chips into a teaching tool, showing students how different affixes and roots can be joined to make words and then placed into a context-rich paragraph. Each set of chips contains two word roots and two affixes that can be combined into four different words. For example, the prefixes im- and sup- might be written on the two sides of one poker chip, and the roots pose and press on the other chip. The four possible words (impose, impress, suppose, suppress) are inserted into four blanks in a paragraph according to context clues. After practicing with both real and "virtual" chips (in the Flip-a-Chip online interactive), students work in pairs to create their own set of chips and corresponding paragraph. They exchange their packets to see whether the context clues are strong enough to enable classmates to fill in the blanks correctly.

A description of how the SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review) can be used to bolster comprehension before, during, and after reading.

This lesson provides a way to combine scientific topics into an English lesson. Students apply specific comprehension strategies to multimodal texts as they investigate and interrogate the effects and possible causes of global warming. Students explore global warming through a variety of photographs, diagrams, and websites. As they look at each type of media, students catalog the strengths and weaknesses of these representations before identifying comprehension strategies that can be applied across various media.

Textmasters was created to bring the collaborative learning environment of literature circles to content area reading with a science or social studies textbook. Students are placed in groups of four and given a schedule of the reading of the upcoming chapter. All students read the same section of the book but complete a role sheet to guide their perspective: Discussion Director, Summarizer, Vocabulary Enricher, and Webmaster. Each role was created with textbook structures and formatting in mind. Students meet together to share their roles. Meetings continue biweekly until the chapter is finished. Creative presentations serve as a review of the chapter content before groups are set up with a new reading schedule.

In this lesson, students create text sets and use them to practice three strategies for reading for information. Students select a topic they want to explore and work in small groups to compile a set of texts related to their topic. Each group discusses their topic, jotting notes and images on a large piece of paper as they talk. They then explore the texts they have gathered, adding more information to the paper to create a "graffiti board" focusing on their topic. Next, students generate a list of key words they think that they'll find if a text contains specific information that they’re looking for. After the teacher models skimming text for key words, students use the strategy on their own text sets. Finally, students are given sustained reading time, followed by writing time without the text, allowing them to put the information they have learned into their own words.

Studies have shown that the think-aloud strategy improves reading comprehension on tests. Through this lesson, the teacher will model the think-aloud strategy for students. Components of think-alouds will be introduced, as well as type of text interactions. Students will develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.

This page contains a wealth of resources for helping students evaluate the quality of information found online during an inquiry project.

This PDF contains a wealth of resources related to content area reading in the middle grades.

This page from the Arizona Department of Education includes documents with explanations and examples of the Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects Standards from the ELA Common Core. Scroll down to find these documents by grade band (6-8, 9-10, 11-12).