Literacy

The science teachers at my school are taking on a literacy initiative this year, inspired in part or in whole by the Common Core literacy requirements.  Each teacher is choosing something literacy-related to add to their class for the year, like having kids read a book with science content and discussing it in class, or doing a Science in the News feature each week.  As a new teacher trying to absorb the structure and systems of the school, my department head is not requiring me to join this initiative this year.  I do think it would be really cool to do something with a popular nonfiction book, or even a fiction book that includes real science and fake science, but I'm not ready for that just yet.  But I do think my kids need some reading-related instruction.

My new school has slightly different demographics from my old school, but the kids probably won't be that different from my old students, who struggled a lot on our big bad state physics test because of reading issues.  In my first year, I gave kids a practice open-response question that I thought would be a piece of cake.  The kids were great at drawing free body diagrams and pretty good at finding net force, and we had even done a Barbie bungee jumping activity the week before.  So I handed out the question in class and asked them to read it and try it on their own.  And the majority of my kids put down their pencils and told me they had no idea how to do it.  I was baffled.  I went around the room rephrasing the situation for them, and kids said, "Oh, is that all?" and drew me beautiful diagrams.  This was my first clue that while my kids could decode each word in the problem, there were barriers to understanding the question that had nothing to do with their physics knowledge.

Now, this is only my third year of teaching and I haven't figured out any magical method to increasing kids' reading comprehension yet.  But I would like to incorporate more reading practice, and my department's literacy initiative is as good a reason as any to commit to doing more small-scale reading practice.

I am thinking of putting it into the Do Now one day per week.  The kids will have to read a short paragraph, ideally taken from a book or newspaper article or whatever I can find.  First they'll have to draw a picture of the situation, and then draw a free body diagram of the forces involved (when we're in the force unit).  Later they could draw me KE and PE bar graphs, or identify what type of heat transfer is going on, or identify as much wave vocabulary as they can that's related.  I'd like for the answer to be something they can draw as often as possible, since that forces them to really think and synthesize information, rather than just picking words semi-randomly out of the paragraph and writing them for their answer.

I think it will be easy enough to incorporate this into my class routine; the only hangup I foresee is the difficulty of finding a supply of appropriate paragraphs.  I can write my own, but I already know that I tend to use words and phrasings that are familiar to the kids, so it's better practice for the state test if the paragraphs come from a variety of sources.  I wish I had started a collection earlier in the summer.

I also need to come up with a catchier name for interpreting a paragraph through a physics perspective.  "Reading Practice" probably isn't going to inspire enthusiasm.