In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout arrives for her first day of school fully literate. She recalls that “reading was something that just came to me” (20). She later compares it to breathing: essential, yet effortless. While some of my students identified with Scout’s passive and painless initiation into literacy, many did not. I always pointed out that Scout’s experience was hardly typical. For many, learning to read is a concerted effort for students, teachers, and parents. Even with support and guidance, for some students learning to read isn’t easy or quick, especially if they fall behind their peers. If students aren’t able to attain the literacy skills they need, reading deficits can impact them across courses and, left unchecked, can hinder them as they enter adulthood.
Enter the unsung hero of this battle, social studies. Of all the core classes and common elementary specials, increased time in social studies yields the greatest increases in literacy for K-5 students. Adam Tyner and Sarah Kabourek’s Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal explains why. One of Tyner and Kabourek’s key arguments is that social studies classes provide students with thought-provoking content, not just abstract skills. Since more-advanced texts require both contextual knowledge and reading skills, elementary ELA classes are often delivering only half of what students need to build literacy.
For students across grade levels, social studies courses provide unique opportunities for students to build, maintain, and expand their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, especially when explicit instruction about literacy is combined with rich, engaging content and multimodal activities. Below is a preview of how we’ve incorporated intentional literacy-building practices into all our textbooks:
There are many kinds of primary and secondary sources that support reading comprehension. Our books are packed with multimodal primary documents from artwork to political cartoons to maps and audio clips, as well as useful secondary sources such as photos, infographics, diagrams, succinct explanations, and scaffolded questions. The engaging context helps students make inferences, double-check understanding, and corroborate evidence, building both social studies and literacy skills.
When I was trained in the science of reading, I was surprised that my sessions were something I found myself enthusiastically describing to anyone who would listen. I may or may not have reverted to my childhood pastime of forcing unsuspecting family members to act as my students while I repeated the day’s lesson to them. Simple rules, fun manipulatives, and structured review helped me imagine very young students with a variety of learning styles succeed. Unlike some esoteric math curricula that notoriously created wars between teachers and parents, science of reading is simple enough for adults to understand and reinforce at home, during tutoring sessions, or in other classes. People who aren’t early elementary teachers, reading specialists, or even teachers at all can learn the concepts to help create a consistent system of support for young readers.
For students who have the skills to read a passage, there’s still much more to being an effective reader, and even more to having the awareness and skillset to navigate new and challenging texts in and out of school. Luckily, once students are identifying words and making sense of sentences, we provide methods to help them use a text effectively to meet their goals. Whether it’s reading a lesson about a new topic, conducting research for a project, or reviewing for an assessment, providing students with strategies to help them meet their goals—and when needed, describe hang-ups—helps them take ownership of the learning process. These skills can be shared across disciplines and grades to create a consistent and thoughtful school culture.
Considering that some educational styles never stray beyond factual recall, while acknowledging that social media is rife with opinions masquerading as fact, many students benefit from guided forays into dissecting and forming evidence-based claims, aka critical thinking. Underpinning all inquiry-based learning, critical thinking helps students identify what they don’t know yet, but want to find out. Scaffolded critical thinking grounds literacy in the process of gathering relevant information and sharing ideas about what we can or should do based on the evidence we have.
With critical thinking comes the desire to share ideas. Whether it’s writing a persuasive essay, discussing an important concept, or listening to new opinions, social studies trains students in real-world communication skills that extend and amplify reading comprehension skills to a variety of situations. With opportunities to compose, visualize, present, discuss, debate, and demonstrate, students get experience navigating the interactions that underpin civic engagement. (We even have one lesson about how to leave a voicemail for high school change-makers taking their findings beyond the classroom.) We write from the perspective that all students have something very important to share, and we want them to feel empowered to use speaking, listening, and writing skills they practice in the classroom to engage with challenges and responsibilities in their daily lives.
For more about how to leverage social studies to build reading and communication skills, we offer asynchronous, virtual, and in-person professional learning to help educators make the most out of embedded literacy activities.