Integrating Literacy Strategies into Science Instruction

Part of Curriculum Collections.

Four students in uniforms lean over a table as they work on a poster featuring text and a bar graph together.

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by several states, teachers across the academic disciplines have been called on to support students in attending to literacy tasks in their subjects in a more intensive way. Science teachers, trained to be content specialists, benefit from receiving professional development in how to explicitly use literacy strategies to support their students’ content understanding. In response to this need, The American Museum of Natural History designed and implemented a series professional development workshops that showed teachers how to integrate literacy strategies into their science instruction. The videos, produced by AMNH, feature teachers who have experienced this professional development at the Museum. The videos capture teachers in their actual classrooms, utilizing literacy strategies within their science lessons. These strategies can be applied to any science content area. The goal of these videos is to paint a picture of the use of literacy strategies to support students’ science content learning in the classroom.

For more information contact Dora Kastel at [email protected].

Literacy Strategies

Video Paraphrasing Paraphrasing gives students a tool for monitoring their own comprehension as they read science text. Video Summarizing in Science Summarizing text helps readers make meaning of complex science material, as demonstrated in this middle school classroom. Video Interactive Read-Alouds This strategy provides students with a shared experience around a text relevant to the science content about which they are learning. Video Interactive Reading Guides This strategy provides a way for students to read a text independently with peer interaction and coaching from the teacher. Video Strategies for Vocabulary Instruction When planning to introduce a text, teachers can make decisions ahead of time on how to facilitate science vocabulary instruction. Video Writing a Scientific Explanation Using the Explanation Tool A writing scaffold called the Explanation Tool can help students understand and develop explanations for natural phenomena.

These resources were developed with the generous support of The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation.