Engaging with Literacy in the Curriculum

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss literacy in the curriculum and engaging students in reading. Many strategies were given. I will share those strategies with you and I hope to hear if you have used them in your classrooms, which ones interest you, and which ones you plan to use.

"Literacy is not something learned once: we continue developing our literacy skills throughout life" (page 56). We are constantly learning through reading. Every time we read a book, newspaper, or even a blog, we are developing our reading skills. With every subject we teach in school or learn in school, we are teaching or learning a new set of vocabulary and terminology. The books says that each subject has it's own packages of knowledge. We know that learning to read and write can be a difficult task for kids. There is a lot to take in and, in all reality, to memorize. For an EL learner, that can be a lot to grasp. This is why it is so important to scaffold and use different strategies.
Here are some tips to make your literacy time more relevant for the students in your classroom, especially the EL learners:

• Go from every day, familiar, and concrete to the subject specific, unfamiliar, and abstract.
• Use concrete examples that are familiar to students and that link to their own real world and out of school experiences.
• Use familiar language to talk about these experiences before moving to move specialized subject language.
• Sequence teaching and learning activities in such a way that you move toward the specialized language of the written texts students will read rather than beginning with the written texts.

There has been research and evidence that says, "explicit teaching of academic language and literacy, modeled and practiced in context, enhances the learning of EL learners" (page 59). We need to give our students multiple opportunities to be successful in the learning environment. Mixing up learning routines with individual, pair, small group, and whole group instruction will allow for your students to have the best learning opportunities.

There are lots of ways to engage your students with reading strategies that can be done individually, in pairs, in small groups, or whole group settings. If you use some of these strategies in your classroom, the students will hopefully be more engaged while learning and engaging in literacy.

Strategies:

• Progressive Brainstorm- students share what they already know about a topic at the beginning of a unit.
• Wallpapering- another way of brainstorming information or ideas.
• Semantic Web/Concept Map- collecting, recording, and organizing information.
• Dictogloss- provides models of academic language, and gives students opportunities to listen, talk, read, write, make notes, reflect on language use, clarify content, and use academic language for themselves.
• Joint Construction- teacher and students jointly write text, the teacher scribes on the board and the students contribute ideas and suggest wording.
• The Last Word- a variation of a normal group discussion based on a text that students have read on a topic with which they are familiar. 
• Thinking Sheets- a structured way of having students make their reasoning explicit while they are engaged in cognitive tasks such as solving a problem, planning how to do something, or working out an explanation.
• Split Dictation- have two versions of a text, each has different omissions. Students are paired and dictate to their partner the parts they have and fill in the parts they don;t have, so collaboratively they complete a whole text.
• Barrier Crossword- the reverse of the usual crossword: the answers are already filled in and the students have to provide the clues. 
• Cloze Exercises- a text with some words deleted. The first and last sentences must remain intact. Words are deleted at regular intervals (example: every 5th word).
• Word Walls- a bank of words displayed on the wall of the classroom.
• Sentence Matching- students match "more spoken" and "more written" meanings.
• Bilingual Dictionaries- encourage bilingual learners who are familiar with key terms in their native language to note new words in English alongside the native tongue or note down English words with a mother tongue definition.

The only one that I have ever used are concept maps and word walls. I want to try a lot of these this coming school year with my second graders. I know that some will probably work better than others, but these are great tools to use during literacy time to get kids thinking about their language and literacy skills. 

Which ones have you used or want to try?