Reading time

Fitting reading activities into daily classroom activities presents problems for teachers. On the one hand, they know reading is important, but then again, educators have to wonder about whether class time should be spent doing something else. After all, students can read whatever material that's pertinent to a particular lesson at home, perhaps in preparation for the following day's class, and there's only so much time in a school day.

However, as John Lee, author of "Visualizing Elementary Social Studies Methods," writes, "Teachers should value all forms of reading in class." Why? I suspect it's because in-class reading activities can improve the reading skills of all students. For example, when students read to each other, and listen to how their fellow classmate is reading, it can improve fluency. Perhaps that's more of a concern for those teaching reading, but in the end, the more opportunities students have to read, it's likely they'll become better readers. And that goes for understanding as well as fluency.

But, time is limited, and we, as teachers, have to make the best use of whatever precious minutes are available for reading. How do we do that? Lee has some suggestions. One, he opines that setting aside 10 to 15 minutes for reading is ideal. You can't read "War and Peace" in that amount of time, but you can provide students with small chunks of written material to peruse within that short period.

According to Lee, teachers need to keep these pedagogical factors in mind when assigning readings, whether in class or out: determine how students would benefit from reading certain written materials when learning about a particular subject; consider conditions such as time, students' reading abilities and length of the source; and how the reading should be adapted and contextualized.

Going further, as potential teachers of social studies, we ought to think about the literacy-related skills the National Council for Social Studies has determined are essential for studying related subject matter. Of course, reading, studying, and thinking are three of them, but we ought to be concerned also with having students develop reference and information search skills, tech savvy and the ability to organize and use information.

There is a great social studies activity outlined on pg. 260-261 from National Geographic's Underground Railroad Experience at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/railroad that offers a rich variety of opportunities for students to work on their social studies literacy skills. I'm sure you all read it, but it follows an imagined runaway slave through different states. Students use various resources to determine the risk the slave faces while on the run. Map skills, visualizing and creative writing are some of the skills that such an activity fosters. And these are the kinds of things we need to keep in mind when developing social studies literacy lessons in our own classrooms.