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Posted by:
Sandra Scott
K-12 Classroom teacher
Stone Mountain, GA
Topic:
Some Project-Centered Ideas
Message:
At our school, teaching literacy in the content areas is not yet a whole-school endeavor. But I can offer some ideas to enable individual teachers with integrating literacy into their content areas (and subsequently affect student achievement):
--Allow students to create projects that encourage analysis of a variety of reading material (fiction and non-fiction beyond the text book) in the subject area you teach.
--Assign a theme for students to focus on. In my case, as a history teacher, our study of World War II went well with the novel, Eleanor's Story: An American Girl Living in Hitler's Germany. This story by Eleanor Ramrath Garner is about a girl whose family moved to Germany prior to the beginning of World War II and how she coped with the anti-American attitudes of Germans and dealt with the challenges of living in a foreign country during the war. The media specialist at our school communicated with the publisher and author of the book. The students read the book, we conducted class discussions that paralleled the story with concepts from our history text, and completed a research project that entailed designing a bulletin board in the classroom and one in the media center displaying what was learned. The students also emailed questions to the author, which she responded to as a group. This type of activity enables students to realize the actual impact that a book has on the author as well as the reader. It made the book and the experiences of the writer come alive for the students.
--Assign students a timeline from which to study the development of a concept in any content area. This allows them to utilize a variety of media for the project. Students could put together a PowerPoint presentation, graphs and charts, and experiments -- all serve to communicate content and demonstrate understanding of the concepts investigated.
--Another project idea is to ask students to create a mosaic or mural as it relates to their content area class. Students would have to employ higher level thinking skills and collaborative planning. In our school, one student designed an American flag using multi-colored, origami-made cranes rather than the traditional material and thread.
Inspiring and challenging students to create beyond the traditional will achieve not only the basic content-area knowledge, but encourages them to think beyond the basic frame of reference to achieve higher level thinking, discourse, and communication skills.
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