As a future math teacher, literacy is not often something that I think about or something that I have even thought about educating myself on. Even though you may do it subconsciously, we use literacy strategies every single day in our lives. Whether we are reading facebook posts, or solving math word problems, we are using reading and literacy strategies and applying them to the content that we need.Before taking this LLED course, I never took the time to see the importance of different reading strategies that can be used in the classroom. One of the tasks that we did was taking a reading strategy and applying it to our content area. So, not only are we teaching our students math, but we are also teaching them a reading strategy that can also be applied in their other subjects.
Tweet to text strategy
The reading strategy that we chose to implement for our lesson plan was a tweet to text strategy. As the teacher, I typed up a document about PEMDAS (Order of Operations). After passing out the reading to the students, we then provided the students with a paper that looked like the image above with a math problem at the top. In only 140 characters (similar to a tweet) they had to describe the important steps in their order of operations that they took to solve the problem. I loved this activity because it brought literacy into the math classroom, while also giving them a reading strategy. Sometimes reading long passages and textbooks can be very overwhelming. If we teach students to limit their summaries of the reading, then they will become accustomed to picking out the most important parts and remembering those for the future.
This task was a great way to get us to introduce a reading/literacy strategy into our classroom, while also incorporating twitter, which may commonly be used among the age of students that we will be teaching. Doing small activities like this with our students can go a very long way with them and create a better understanding for topics rather than just having them read paragraph after paragraph about a certain subject.
The book club activity that we completed with our classmates also helped me develop reading strategies and literary strategies in a content area that was not my own. For the book club, I chose to do a cross-curricular book and read a book that best applies to social studies. For the book club we were each assigned a task when reading the book and took on that role when reading through the book. We made notes on post-it notes and came back to share our findings with our group. This was a great reading strategy in my opinion because you are not trying to focus on too many things at once. For example, I was the connector, while reading Troubled River I was constantly making connections to prior knowledge and sharing these with my group whenever we met. My classmate was the questioner, so the whole time she was reading, she was thinking of questions that would be good to have a discussion about. I really think that book clubs can be very effective in the classroom. They teach very good reading and literacy strategies and can be effective in a very cross-curricular way.
Well yes, math is very cool. This course has taught me how to dig deeper into math and recognize the literary component of it that does often go unnoticed. I have learned many strategies that I can apply to my lessons and help my students in improving their literacy. Coming into this class I definitely did not think that it was a math teacher's place to be teaching anything about literacy. But, after completing some activities, my opinion has definitely changed and I cannot wait to implement these with my kids.
Word Count: 646
