Context: I adapted a published Storypath curriculum on Communities and Their Decisions to integrate the social studies content with reading skill instruction; specifically, reading and comprehending informational texts. Students read short informational texts describing different categories of places in a community (such as businesses or recreation), then worked with a partner to create a web with different examples that fit into each category. Students used the web in the next lesson to choose a place to create for our classroom community mural. Artifacts include the lesson plan I developed on reading informational texts, examples of student work, and the community mural that students created.

In this lesson, I scaffolded student comprehension of an informational text through direct instruction of text features, doing a shared reading of the text, modeling how to organize information using a graphic organizer, and having students work in pairs to synthesize information from the text. I activated students’ background knowledge prior to the lesson by asking each pair to think of important places in their own community before reading the text and listing these on chart paper to reference later in the lesson. I elicited students’ ideas and prompted them to verbalize their thinking to develop oral as well as written communication. Finally, I provided a meaningful transition to the next day’s lesson by connecting what students learned from reading the text to the next activity of choosing a place to create for our community mural.

One of the ways I adapted for individual differences among students in this lesson was by making the text accessible to students of all reading abilities. Since all students need experience reading and comprehending informational texts, I read aloud parts of the text while some students read aloud with me, some students read with their eyes only, and some students listened to the text. In addition, I borrowed informational texts from the library on community people and places for students to read and used a website on which students could listen to factual information about different community helpers. Students worked in pairs to help each other think of additional community places not described in the text to add to the web. The community places web included picture cues for students who had difficulty reading the different categories, and I recorded student responses on chart paper to adapt my instruction for students who needed visual support.

Reflection: In a new era of standards-based education, many schools are advocating for a “back-to-basics” curriculum, claiming that teachers need to focus on teaching students how to read, write, and do mathematics. Subjects like social studies, science, and the arts are eliminated from the curriculum because teachers do not have the time to teach these subjects during the school day. These decisions made by the schools stem from a perspective that different subject areas are disconnected and isolated from each other, rather than making connections among different curricular areas. When we view the curriculum as being integrated among multiple subject areas, students can make meaningful connections among different disciplines and enrich their own background knowledge.

There are purposeful, pedagogical reasons for including social studies in the elementary school curriculum. “Teachers who are committed to helping struggling readers achieve high levels of literacy must not ignore the prior knowledge/reading comprehension relationship. Children in the primary grades must spend a portion of each day engaging in activities in which increasing their world knowledge is the primary goal” (Allington and Cunningham, 2003). For students to comprehend what they read, they must have some background knowledge and in many cases, content-specific vocabulary. This “world knowledge” comes not only from learning social studies, but from having experiences outside of the classroom, such as family vacations, trips to museums, and interests such as sports or music. When one considers that children come to school with widely diverse experiences, it becomes all the more urgent for schools to create these experiences for students to help them further develop this “world knowledge.”

Schools and classrooms that are committed to character education and spending time teaching students specific social skills view the social curriculum as an “academic enabler,” meaning that students learn academic content more effectively when they have learned specific social skills such as responsibility, self-control, empathy, and cooperation. Teachers should not assume that students come to school knowing how to get along with others, solve conflicts peacefully, or manage their own behavior in positive ways. The social curriculum significantly impacts the extent to which a student can participate in the academic curriculum, and social skills must be explicitly taught to students.

When I taught this unit on Communities, I struggled during the first two weeks with how much time was spent creating the community: choosing a role to play, creating a visual representation of this role, using a variety of artistic materials to build a mural of our classroom community, and voting on a name for our community. Yet once the foundation for the unit had been established, students had ownership over the community because it was something that they had each participated in creating. When I enlisted the help of another student at the school to come in and introduce a “critical incident,” which was proposing to tear down parts of the community to build a new shopping mall, the second grade “citizens” in my class were in an uproar. It surprised me to see how strong their emotions were in response to the critical incident and the vehemence with which they voted to refuse the proposal, offered alternative solutions, discussed advantages and disadvantages to specific solutions, and constructed a response to solve the problem and resolve the conflict as a cohesive group. Therefore, not only were the social studies lessons I taught teaching students to read informational texts and develop comprehension skills, students were engaged in a task that was individually meaningful and allowed them to collaborate with each other to create a positive change. Through this experience, I learned that teaching social studies as well as science and the arts promotes the development of higher-level thinking skills and content knowledge that are necessary for creating democratic citizens who are prepared to make decisions and solve problems in our communities in the future.

Cunningham, Patricia M., and Allington, Richard L. (2003). Classrooms That Work: They Can ALL Read and Write. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.