Literacy in Any Content Area

My first year of teaching middle school math and science was filled with one realization after another. Early ones included: Don’t ever turn your back on the students; never let more than two students get up at once; smile when you feel like crying. Once the task of classroom management was less of an issue, my awareness that Jeremiah does great with computation but never answers the word problems correctly, and Maria can explain the process of photosynthesis but never seems to do well on written assessments, grew. After listening to students read from our course textbook, it was apparent that most of the reading was simply far too difficult for many of them.

Most classes have 30 to 50 % of students who simply can not read even a few paragraphs of the textbook without feeling overwhelmed. These are also the same students who score extremely low on tests, fail to finish, or in some cases even start writing assignments, and then refuse to complete notes. Each one of these students have their own story but for all of them literacy plays a role in their inability to perform successfully at school.

For content-area teachers providing literacy instruction specific to, or in support of, their field of study can be daunting: It is outside of our areas of expertise and often adds hours of prep and training time to our already demanding schedules.

Thankfully Lessonwriter gives teachers — regardless of knowledge of how to teach literacy — tools to provide high-quality, pedagogically-sound literacy instruction.

I just go to LessonWriter.com and put in any text that I want to use in my class and in moments LessonWriter delivers a lesson plan and teaching components with multiple options for teaching literacy through the content-area material, such as pre-teaching vocabulary or challenging students to construct meaning based on the text. The lessons and student worksheets can serve as support for readings in class or at home, or as the basis for a fully-integrated literacy lesson based on relevant content. With these tools I can address the needs of those students who struggle with anything from phonemic awareness to rhetorical structure and still teach the content required by my subject-area standards.

Lesson Writer relieved me of having to choose between the content that needs to be covered and the skills that students need in order to make any content-learning meaningful.

by Jennifer Applebaum, M.S.Ed.
http://LessonWriter.com