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Five Pillars of Literacy and Science

Making connections between literacy and science not only makes good use of instructional time, but provides students with authentic opportunities to use literacy strategies to improve content knowledge.  The two pillars of vocabulary and comprehension are especially relevant when addressing science topics.  Both can be enhanced by using science notebooks.  Below, you can find links to strategies and resources for enhancing science vocabulary and comprehension.

VOCABULARY

Here are a few strategies that would work well for improving science vocabulary:

  • Alphaboxes - A great way to activate prior knowledge and identify possible misconceptions around science vocabulary
  • Connect Two - This strategy gets students thinking about possible meanings of new vocabulary words in a reading passage.
  • Every Student Gets a Chance  - Allows students to build confidence in their oral language abilities by repeating a new concept or idea.
  • RAFT - This tool can help generate RAFT prompts for your science class.
  • Rule of Three  - The Rule of 3 specifically targets Tier 2 words, those that are cross-disciplinary, multiple meaning words.
  • Think Write Pair Share - This strategy can be used either pre- or post-reading to reflect on vocabulary understanding.
  • Word Wall - This is a common strategy used to keep science vocabulary in front of students at all times and encourage connections to other subject areas as well.

COMPREHENSION

Here are a few strategies that would work well for improving science comprehension:

  • Alphaboxes - Have students record new vocabulary and/or concepts as they read a science passage.
  • Anticipation Guide - Students think about and make predictions prior to reading a text.
  • Canned Questions - Differentiated questions to address all levels of Bloom's.
  • Content Area Read Aloud - This strategy is utilized extensively in the Picture Perfect Science Lessons series.
  • Herringbone or other Graphic Organizers - Graphic organizers support making connections between topics and concepts.
  • Listening Passage Preview - Helps students with low fluency access the text and spend less time on decoding and more time on comprehension.
  • Magnet Summaries - Helps model the skills needed to create a summary while also enhancing science comprehension.
  • QAR - This strategy can also address questions along Bloom's while helping develop subject area comprehension while practicing general comprehension skills.
  • Quick Writes - This strategy can be used both before reading to activate prior knowledge or after reading as a formative assessment tool.
  • RAFT - This tool can help generate RAFT prompts for your science class.
  • Think Write Pair Share - This strategy can be used either pre- or post-reading to reflect on vocabulary understanding.
  • KWL - The K-W-L strategy can generate background knowledge, set a purpose for reading and transform information, writing and talking.
  • Read Like a Detective - This strategy could be used with both teacher and student claims about a topic or experiment to find the evidence and support their reasoning.
  • Show you Know - The extension activity of creating an "infoposter" could be used to allow for student differentiation in final product and provide an opportunity to work with a variety of tech related media.
  • Think Like a P.I. - Students consider two questions as they process a piece of text: “What is it about?” and “What about it?