Reading Strategies to Unlock the Social Studies
This practical, hands-on workshop for secondary-level educators will focus on strategies and approaches that help students with nonfiction reading in the social studies. Eight organizational patterns of text structure will be examined, including description, cause and effect, compare / contrast, problem/solution, concept definition, sequence, proposition / support, and goal / action / outcome. Participants will identify and find examples of each in social studies texts, acquire and apply reading strategies appropriate for each type of text structure, and determine ways of using strategies in both instruction and assessment. In addition, participants will acquire and apply other strategies that help students unlock social studies content in the secondary classroom, including vocabulary strategies, anticipation guides, summarizing, synthesizing and evaluating information, making inferences, and making predictions. Participants are asked to bring a grade-level text to use during the workshop.