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I never would have thought to implement a book club lesson in my future classroom. As a science and social studies content area teacher, it seemed that there aren’t really any narrative type books that would be beneficial for my students to learn the curriculum. I’ve only ever seen book clubs being used in my literature classes when I was in school. However, this chapter gives great insight as to why book clubs can be beneficial for every classroom, no matter what content area.  Book clubs can be very fun and exciting because students get the choice to choose their own book, their own involvement, and determine their own discussion in the book clubs. As a teacher, I would help them learn how to lead literacy discussions about a book in order for my students to become independent literary commentators. Maybe before having individual book clubs, a class-wide book club could be beneficial to model what the group-led book clubs will look like. I like that students get to determi...

Environmental Literacy and Inquiry  is a resource for science content area teachers to use for curriculum that involves the environment. There are five different sections of curriculum materials on this website: energy, tectonics, climate change, land use change, and socio-environmental science investigations. Each of these curriculum sections have and overview, resources, lesson layout, and assessments that can be used for each unit. These units don’t perfectly line up with the Georgia Standards of Excellence, but I think these topics have great social value to students and can get students to think about how science can be used to combat climate change and come up with renewable energy sources.              Each of these units has instructional resources and support materials that include a wide variety of videos and literature that students can read about regarding each of the environmental science topics...

Summary: I read the article titled, “Historical Fiction in English and Social Studies Classrooms: Is It a Natural Marriage?” One discussion is about collaboration between ELA teachers and social studies teachers. It mentions historical empathy and thinking as if you were the person in a historical source or narrative. Another discussion is about fiction vs nonfiction and when to use each and the benefits of each type. The article finishes with the distinction of what literacy means among different content areas (English and social studies). Connections: When I read Night by Wiesel, my 7th grade teacher also made sure to remind us of the historical context of the book and we did a short activity where we placed the events in the book along the timeline of history events that led up to and during them. Also, when we used a newspaper in social studies, it was identified as a primary source and we view the historical context. We never viewed “primary sources” in English class.  ...

Our lesson plan involved using pictures to get students engaged in the subject before reading about it in a text. Based on the feedback we got, what went well was the use of an interactive website that allowed students to scroll over the cell and learn about the different cell structures. Another thing that went well was allowing the students to discuss with each other what they were looking at in the image. In the future, I would make copies of a cropped section of the image and have different groups have a different section. Then after a few minutes to try and decipher the image, each group would share what they thought was going on in the image. Another thing I would change is how detailed my instructions were. A lot of the feedback we got was that people were confused as to what they were supposed to do and where on the website they were supposed to go. I was very bad in assuming people were following along and I didn’t give people an opportunity to say that they were confused....