I have to say that the videos and reading this week were a little bit difficult to relate to the primary levels of Elementary Education where the majority of what we read IS basic literacy, intentionally, but there were some helpful insights that made me understand the importance of also going beyond basic literacy in our read-alouds and with those students who are ready.
Reading Rockets highlighted Literacy expert Tim Shanahan who says that "disciplinary literacy is generally taught in middle school and high school, but that K-5 teachers can get their students ready. Here’s how: In the elementary grades, making sure that kids are reading about geography, economics, history, culture, biography, environmental science, life science, physical science, music, art, and current events is really important. Building kids’ stores of knowledge in those areas and giving them practice dealing with that kind of language and content is imperative" (WETA, 2025)
There are some great books that contain great disciplinary literacy content but are written in a friendlier format for younger students like in poems or with lots of illustrations. I had the opportunity to do an interactive read aloud with a beautiful book this week called Where do I sleep? A Pacific Northwest Lullaby by Jennifer Blomgren. This book gives clues through poems of what the animal is on each page. Our students loved it because it put a lot of the information we have been learning about animals to work! We made it interactive by having them divide a paper into 12 boxes front and back, they then guessed what each animal was as I was reading the clues.
I also had an opportunity to teach about herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. This was actually the active piece of my science lesson that I had to go ahead and teach this week (don't worry, my lesson plan was complete before I taught!). This coming week the students will be doing their own research on their animal reports so there won't be any active teaching.
I was given google slides and videos as my resources which made me think of this from our reading, “much of the research and academic content available to students is now digital. This makes traditional mark-up tools like pencils and highlighters largely obsolete, since they will not work on a computer screen. Much of the content that students find is not even text-based. Rather, it’s often in the form of a video, graphic, or image. Because of this, our students need new tools and strategies for interacting with text in a digital environment” (AVID Center, 2025). I thought this comment was so relevant to the way our students learn now. Our students do the majority of their learning from a screen. In first grade our student have learned some simple note-taking strategies when being given information in a slideshow or video.
After the slideshow and videos, and a lot of really engaging discussion, the students did an animal sort using their new vocabulary words of herbivores, carnivores & omnivores.
References
AVID Center. (2025). Social Studies Dimension 3: Evaluating
Sources and Using Evidence. AVID Open Access.
https://avidopenaccess.org/resource/dimension-3-evaluating-sources-and-using-evidence/
WETA. (2025). Content Area Literacy | Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/content-area-literacy
Jess- I really liked that you included the quote from Tim Shanahan about making sure elementary students are having access to a variety of non-fictional texts. I hadn't really thought about the interrelationship between literacy and the sciences before, but am glad we were exposed to these findings because I think it serves as good reminders to give our students all types of literature.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful lesson for the students to access prior knowledge to figure out the animal being described! They used evidence and their listening skills and probably had fun along the way! I'm impressed that 1st graders are starting to learn to take notes! Makes sense given how widely used technology is in our classrooms these days. Nice post!