Integrating Literacy into Social Studies

In social studies, it is very easy for writing and reading to be combined into the curriculum.  My students write for me all the time because I believe it is a necessary skill no matter what class you are in and no matter what age you are.  I think that the skill of being able to read something and then to be able to put those thoughts into writing, using critical thinking, is a skill that will be taken beyond school and that will make students into adults that are able to pose questions about the world they live in.  I also use writing to get my students to connect with the material in a more meaningful way.  Everyday, we have a question of the day that students respond to in their journal.  Sometimes the question has to deal directly with the content as a way for me to check for understanding and other times I will use it as a gateway to get the students thinking about the basic concept behind what we are studying.  For example, today we were talking about the alliances made before WWI even started so I asked the students if they had ever made a pact with anyone and what it was about.  We talked about what pacts are and what they look like and I was able to use that conversation we had as a class to transition into our topic of the formation of the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente by comparing their experiences with what happened before WWI.  Often times, students hear historical facts and places and will forget them after the test, but I feel if I can link a key fact to something they understand and they can write about it, it will stick with them longer.  Not only is this useful at the secondary level, but according to Kent and Simpson in their article “Social Studies and Literacy Integration”, social studies can be used in the primary levels to enforce the reading skills that they will need throughout their lives (2008).  According to this same article, in the era of high-stakes testing, social studies often gets left out of elementary classrooms in favor of working on skills in reading and math, but these authors advocate that social studies can be used to strengthen these skills as well as teach students about their own history (2008).

Social studies textbooks can often be very dry and not very accessible to students according to an article titled “Improving Reading Skills in Social Studies” (2005).  In order to make the text more accessible to students, this article encourages teachers to use graphic organizers for pre-reading a section as well as allowing students to take factual knowledge and act it out as to how they understand it (2005).  This is a great opportunity to integrate technology to allow students to access their own textbook in a more meaningful way.  Many textbooks have websites that allow students to take online quizzes over chapters, create their own graphic organizers and provide links to other websites where students can learn more about a specific topic.  I often supplement the textbook I have in my class with online activities so that way students can gain information from other sources besides the “all-powerful” textbook.  It is important for student to know how to find information from many different sources and the internet provides that opportunity.  It is important though to teach students right up front what is a credible source and what is not.  This also plays into literacy because students are able to analyze the language a page uses as well as looking for spelling and grammar errors that might point to a bogus website.

Another integration of social studies, reading, writing and the internet is the ability to access primary source documents from all around the world and having students respond to those documents through response questions, graphic organizers or other reading tools.  In an article titled “Tech Talk for Social Studies Teachers”, the authors point to many reliable, useful sites on Nazi Germany and the impact of the Holocaust on the world (Street and Stang, 2006).  I have said this many times in other blog entries but this is really where all four areas meet together.  To know history of some event, such as the Holocaust, it is crucial for students to be able to read documents from that time and analyze what they have to tell them.  A textbook can tell anyone the history of the world, but to read what someone actually thought about what was going on during that time is to bring history alive.

Not only can students learn about history through primary source documents, there are also a wealth of books, fiction and non-fiction, that have been written about various events.  In the book Hana’ Suitcase written by Karen Levine, she follows the true story of a suitcase that was sent to the Holocaust museum in Tokyo, Japan to find out who Hana was and how she was impacted by the Holocaust.  Not only can students read this book that details the story of a child who lived during the Holocaust, but there is a website called Google Lit Trips that links up with Google Maps showing students the path of this suitcase as well as historical events that occurred during World War II on the world map.  It is an amazing  tool that links history, geography and literature together.

I am a big believer in writing across the curriculum; it should not just be for English teachers to teach.  Each content area teacher should take responsibility for teaching some skill linked to literacy in their classroom so that students can see that there are different techniques and strategies to read depending on what you are reading or writing about.  It is a skill students will use for the rest of their lives and the more practice they can get, the better they are prepared to use it.

Amboe, K. (2010). Hana’s suitcase. Retrieved from http://googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/6-8/Entries/2008/5/10_Hanas_Suitcase_by_Karen_Levine.html

Improving reading skills in the social studies classroom. (2005). Retrieved from http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/subject/improving_reading.phtml

Kent, A, & Simpson, J. (2008). Social studies and literacy integration: making the most of our teaching. Social Studies Research and Practice, 3(1), Retrieved from http://www.socstrp.org/issues/PDF/3.1.12.pdf

Street, C, & Stang, K. (2006). Tech talk for social studies teachers. The Social Studies, Retrieved from http://proquest.umi.com.libproxy.boisestate.edu/pqdlink?vinst=PROD&fmt=6&startpage=-1&ver=1&vname=PQD&RQT=309&did=1478055571&exp=03-17-2015&scaling=FULL&vtype=PQD&rqt=309&TS=1268956034&clientId=8813