Literacy Matters - Winter 2020

topic, as well as any fiction books you may have that might tie into that topic. Your classroom library, your school library, or your school’s media center specialist may all be good resources for finding these texts. Think of scientific skills that you would like your students to learn through your unit of study, and then utilize literacy and writing to help design a unit of study that will allow the student to think like a scientist to master that skill. Food Chain, Predators and Prey, and Habitats During a study of animal behavior, students choose an animal, or are assigned an animal by their teacher, and then write a poem about that animal. The caveat is that the poem must describe their animal without stating the name of the animal. Poems can include descriptions of physical appearance and may allude to whether the animal is a predator or prey of certain other animals. Other helpful details might include what the animal eats, the habitat the animal lives in, or any other information that the student chooses to include or that the teacher would like to require the students to include based on grade level and student needs. Other students may take turns guessing the animal that is being described in the poem. Teachers may wish to model this, using their own animal and writing a poem together with the class describing this animal. Once all poems are written and have been “solved,” students may make connections by linking poems in particular food chains together. For example, a poem about a grasshopper could connect to a poem about a frog, which could connect to a poem about a snake, which could connect to a poem about an eagle. The teacher may wish to use their sample poem, modeled with the class, as the first poem for all other poems to “link” or “connect” to in the food chain.

Science Standards place a great deal of importance on how students communicate in science. For example, Next Generation Science Standard 3-PS2 includes 3-PS2-1: Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object ; 3-PS2-3: Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other ; and 3-PS2-4: Define a simple design problem that can be solved by applying scientific ideas about magnets . This means it is important for teachers who teach science to be aware of how they can integrate literacy into science instruction. With the most recent version of these standards published in 2017, it is particularly important for us as teachers to understand how to use them in their instructional planning and classroom instruction. in 2014, and the South Carolina College- and Career-Ready Standards for English Language Arts, developed in 2015. Both the Next Generation Science Standards and the South Carolina Academic Standards and Performance Indicators for Science use crosscutting concepts, originally outlined by the National Research Council (2012), that connect knowledge across the science disciplines. These crosscutting concepts are: (a) patterns; (b) cause and effect; (c) scale, proportion, and quantity; (d) systems and system models; (e) energy and matter; (f) structure and function; and (g) stability and change. The Next Generation Science Standards add two additional crosscutting areas, which are interdependence of science, engineering, and technology; and influence of engineering, technology, and science on society and the natural world. The South Carolina College and Career-Ready Standards for English Language Arts have a focus on inquiry and communicating what is learned. Creating Your Own Units of Study Below are several instructional unit ideas in which writing can be integrated into science instruction in the elementary grades and the correlating national and state science and English language South Carolina is currently using the South Carolina Academic Standards and Performance Indicators for Science, developed

Reading Matters Writing Matters

Grasshopper ➞

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Frog

Snake

Eagle

The teacher may choose to let students research the animal using classroom books and technology. For students who need additional support, the teacher could provide “sentence starters”

arts standards. For each idea below, the teacher can scaffold as much or as little as needed to provide support for all students. To do this yourself, first think of the science topic or standard that you are teaching. Then, look through your ELA standards for your grade level and think of ways that those standards might tie in with your science topic of choice. It may help to do a quick search of informational texts related to that

TYPE OF STANDARDS ADDRESSED SC Academic Standards and Performance Indicators for Science

STANDARD

• 2.L.5A.1: Obtain and communicate information to classify animals (such as mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, or insects) based on their physical characteristics • 2.L.5B.1: Obtain and communicate information to describe and compare how animals interact with other animals and plants in the environment • 3.L.5A.2: Develop and use a food chain model to classify organisms as producers, consumers, and decomposers and to describe how organisms obtain energy • 5.L.4B.2: Develop and use models of food chains and food webs to describe the flow of energy in an ecosystem • 5.L.4B.3: Construct explanations for how organisms interact with each other in an ecosystem (including predators and prey, and parasites and hosts) • 2-LS4-1: Make observations of plants and animals to compare the diversity of life in different habitats • 3-LS4-4: Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there • I.1.3.2/I.2.3.2: Select the most important information, revise ideas, and record and communicate findings • I.2.4.1: Interpret relationships and patterns discovered during the inquiry process

Next Generation Science Standards

SC College and Career- Ready Standards for English Language Arts

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

• W.2.7: Participate in shared research and writing projects • W.2.8: Recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question

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