Lisa Hawley
Elementary Teacher
Integrating Literacy and Science
As part of my master's degree, I completed work in two areas of concentration. The first area was literacy education and the second was math and science education. The largest impact on my teaching came from learning how much students benefit from integrating literacy instruction with other subject areas. This page highlights the work I have done in this area. It includes lessons and essays that I created for the courses in my concentrations, as well as items I have created for my classroom applying the knowledge I have gained.
Showcase
In TE 855, Teaching School Mathematics, I completed an action research project on the effects of teaching students a problem-solving framework on their persistence and accuracy in solving math problems. This framework gave students a reading comprehension strategy for math problems.
Integrating Literacy and Mathematics
Integrating Literacy and Social Studies
In TE 842 Elementary Reading Assessment and Instruction, I did a research project on the effects of integrating literacy instruction with the content areas of science and social studies. When I discovered that students can increase their reading skills as well as their content knowledge with this approach, I decided to try it in my classroom. I began by writing a letter to my administrators, explaining the benefits of integrating literacy instruction with content area instruction.
In the spring of 2012, I took TE 861a, Teaching Science for Understanding. For the teaching project in that class, I created a lesson sequence on classifying animals. I integrated reading comprehension instruction as my students used text to gain understanding about how animals can be classified. I also addressed a common misconception among my students that invertebrates were not animals.
As part of my project for TE 842, I created an integrated unit for my grade-level team and I that we taught at the beginning of the school year. In third grade, our social studies curriculum is based around the topic of communities. This is an introductory unit to that theme. It incorporates several social studies and literacy standards. Students are taught to identify text structures that compare and contrast, as well as several communication standards, while also learning about features of communities.
Photo by Sanja Gjenero
Photo by Guillaume Riesen
In TE 848, Writing Assessment and Instruction, I learned to think of writing genres in terms of function instead of the traditional fiction or nonfiction. I realized that students are already asked to write in mathematics when they explain their answers. This course showed me the importance of teaching math explanations as a writing genre and I created a lesson sequence to teach students how to write in that genre.
For TE 861b, Inquiry and the Nature of Science, I created a unit on soil that combined inquiry skills, understanding of science concepts, and reading instruction. At my school, there is a patch of bare soil where the grass will not grow. In this unit, my students explored why that was happening. They learned about many different properties of soil in their investigation. I used science text to help them understand what materials made up soil. Part of the project also included an analysis of the inquiry skills in the lessons.
After teaching my original integrated unit on communities, I created a lesson sequence on forces and motion. I incorporated what I had learned about integrating literacy into content areas and teaching science for understanding. In this unit, students learn to identify causes and effects in text, as well as in hands-on experiences with forces and motion.
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