Introduction Many teachers in the field overlook exactly how important literacy skills are in their content area. Many often push the responsibility of training the students in literacy skills to educators in the English department. This is truly a shame since the kids are only getting a fraction of literacy skill training they need to truly be successful in all of their classes and on standardize tests. As a social studies education major I know that I can help my students develop and use literacy skills that will not only help them in my classroom, but in the other classes they are taking or will be taking.
Teaching Content Literacy Skills
One of my strongest literacy skills is active note taking. I think this is an important
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I would use active notes on readings as a low stakes assessment, I want to know if my students are getting the main points of the reading, and whether or not my students have mastered this skill. As strong as I am with active note taking, I know I will struggle with certain elements of teaching vocabulary to my students.
Personally I think the vocabulary chunking will be the most difficult for me to incorporate into my classroom. When I was working on the vocabulary lesson plan for the literacy class I found that it was really difficult for myself to get into the mindset of my student to find out which words should be included and which ones should be clustered together. Once I did find a good word to cluster, I wasn't sure if certain words would make that cluster easier to understand or more
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These will provide opportunities for me to learn the latest and greatest practices while making personal connections to my content area. In addition to workshops, I check with the English departments and other social studies teachers in the area to see what they are doing to build and develop literacy skills. Having a wide network, and developing lesson plans with other departments can help make previous lesson plans with little to no content literacy skill building new and innovative. When all else fails I know I can email my content literacy professor Mary Jo Froemming when I have any questions or concerns about using new content literacy strategies and tools I come