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Cultivating & Integrating Literacy Across the Curriculum

Cultivating & Integrating Literacy Across the Curriculum

by Howard Slepkov

Books Language Learning Education for Kids

A Deep Dive Into What Integration Really Is

When I first began school, the timetable was artificially divided up into segments of time oriented around specific subject areas. By the time I was finished teaching pre-service students, we were no longer talking about subject areas but integration across them. Literacy is the key way to begin to think about integration because we always begin with one of the language modalities when we are teaching and then branch out from there. So we can use reading as a spring board to think about how WHAT we are reading relates to WHERE it fits Into the greater body of knowledge. Our minds do not think about channels but rather pictures that tie things together and make sense of the world. Integration is how that process works. We integrate the new into what is already there.

Curiosity, Conceptual Development & Literacy Enhancement

Literacy enhancement beyond the skills involved in reading comprehension begins with basic curiosity about the world. As we explore the world around us, we create concepts in our minds about the objects in our environment and the people and places we visit and meet. Through experiences we move from concrete ideas about those things to the ability to think abstractly about them. Once we can think abstractly, we can read about those same things and add or change or evolve our concepts and apply them in different environments. Only through reading can we continue to evolve our understanding of the world around us and apply what we learn to new and different situations.

Personal Reflections on Joanne Levy's Fish Out of Water

To help our students develop a real love of reading and to enhance literacy skill growth, we need to lead them to books in which they will find something of themselves either in the characters or the situations or their passions and interests. My generation was not lucky that way to go into a library and find books that we could identify with on a very personal level. That might be one reason why few ever went beyond high school. But today, there are books like the one I speak about in this podcast that present characters and situations that a reader like myself could have identified with way back when. I explore why in this podcast.

Enhancing Literacy Means Aiming For Deep Learning

Last week, I posted about the banning of books and how I reacted to what happened in the Deep South recently. Since then, an old friend approached me about my thoughts on different approaches to dealing with book banning and what I thought might be done to combat it. I decided, in thinking about it, that we needed to work hard to educate teacher and parents about how reading aloud and reading programs through the years in school had to be focussed on making reading creating change in how students see and understand the world. Only by cultivating deep learning which I explore in this podcast, will children become adults who do not see reading as threatening but as a way to understand better what the world is all about and how to understand and respond to the diversity of humanity in the world.

Other Words For Home by Jasmine Warga

In order to effectively reach an increasingly diverse student population, teachers need to understand where their students have come from and what their lives must have been like at an earlier time. We are no longer on the same wave length as our students. Teachers need to read books like this to try and be able to see the world through the eyes of their students so that they can reach them and help them learn. Teachers cannot advocate and preach about reading unless they read themselves and this gives them a place to begin their reading.

Banning Books And / Or Not Repairing the World

The banning of books in elementary schools comes from stakeholders who prefer not to enable their students to learn about the world for sure. But more importantly, it prevents from students acquiring and building on what we would refer to as empathy - an ability to see the world of others through our own eyes and therefore respond to others from a place of understanding, not hate or rejection or intolerance. Not every student wants to usually read books that have been pulled from shelves but those who do are prevented from understanding something which they want to understand and when they do not understand, they cannot in any way help to repair the world of its ills and intolerance.

In the Wild Light By Jeffrey Zentner

In this podcast, I explain how I got turned on to the reading of Children's and Young People's Fiction, why I continue with selections from this field even today and how I come to learn about new books to seek out even though I am not in the classroom any more. I use the book In the Wild Light by Jeffrey Zentner to explore how we can help young people delve into issues like faith, friendship, loss, addiction and planning for the future while enhancing a love of reading for its own sake. Jeffrey Zentner is a good choice for this because he was a musician first and played backup for some major stars before he turned to writing books for young people. That's the kind of author a lot of young people can identify with.

Integrating Literature Across the Curriculum

Today's and tomorrow's classrooms will be increasingly organized around BIG IDEAS which enable students to look at the issues in their world from a variety of different perspectives. The BIG IDEAS become the springboards for new deep learning around interests that the students themselves are captivated by rather than knowledge, skills and affect chosen by some curriculum written by professionals far removed from any classroom. Often times, great literature for children can be the springboard to exploration by students of the world around them in a meaningful way. In this podcast I explore this idea and give some examples of just how this might happen.

Those Who Read Succeed! Easier Said Than Done!

I used to have a poster hanging in my classroom that said THOSE WHO READ, SUCCEED! I used that challenge to my students for the second half of my career, all the way into teaching young people how to teach and what it meant to encourage literacy in the classroom. But there are things we have to do to set the individual student on the path to a love of learning and the WE begins with not just the school environment but the home environment as well. Each of us must do our parts to take our students on an individual journey into the world of books and help them find themselves in the page of what they read often enough that they become hooked for life.

Using Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming in a Classroom or at Home

Homecoming is the first book in a seven-book series of books written by Cynthia Voigt about the Tillerman family. The four Tillerman children are deserted by their mother in a car in a parking lot and the book deals with how the four children survive until they find a new home with their grandmother. This is an important series of books because it deals with issues that are so terribly important today. Homelessness, family dysfunction, mental illness, all are things we need to bring to the attention of our students if we want them to develop emotional intelligence and help us to try and deal with one of the central problems affecting society today.

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