Throughout this semester we have constantly reiterated that content-area literacy is vitally important for the education of students. Before this LLED 3530 course I did not really understand what content-area literacy really even meant. This class has thoroughly prepared me to understand why it is so important and then be able to implement strategies in my classroom to help obtain that goal.
The most helpful resource in the class so far has been the textbook, Subjects Matter. Page 30 in the textbook has a list of eight reading strategies that are essential for readers to focus on in annotating/analyzing a text. It is important for educators to make sure students are fluent in these strategies to ensure that students become good readers and are able to comprehend texts. The think aloud we did in class were an awesome way for teachers to help students develop these skills in a content-area classroom. There were also other strategies mentioned in the book that would be helpful in teaching content-area literacy in the classroom. Some of these include frontloading with images, reading aloud, KWL’s, dramatic role-plays, partner reading, and post-it response notes. Having my classmates teach me each of these strategies was extremely helpful and I am thankful that there is now a Google Drive where I can look at these and draw lessons from them if I need to. The point of those strategies were to help increase motivation for reading and provide structure to the reading so that they are applying the reading strategies that they need to the text.
Another helpful activity in class was the book club that we did. While I am still not sure I would do a book club in my science class, it was a very thought provoking and interesting idea. I personally do not think it would be useful to read a whole book in my content-area class based on the project but I did come to the conclusion that I think it would be super helpful to use excerpts from “real life” books rather than just textbooks. This encourages the fact that there is real world application to the concepts that I teach and that they are useful. I feel like students get the idea that they will never use any of the stuff that they learn in school, so I believe book clubs would be helpful in proving them wrong and motivating them more. I also enjoyed the book clubs turning into a podcast. I think creating podcasts is an amazing idea for students and can help increase their literacy so much. It makes students talk and interact with a text together and apply that to the recording. This forces every student to get involved and show their understanding of a text.
Lastly, I enjoyed creating the text set to help myself in the future and help my classmates. The collective effort to create unit plans that involve so much universal learning design and content literacy will be so helpful in all of our future teaching endeavors. It is really exciting to already be getting head starts like that and see that we are all in this together. This semester has been amazing my future teaching has benefitted more than I can probably ever understand.
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