Integrating Writing into Social Studies and Science

Time is a valuable commodity in the elementary classroom.  Many teachers are being asked to integrate writing and reading instruction into Social Studies and Science. Here is an example of one way that a teacher integrated  science and writing together. The students in her class wrote an ABC book all about electricity.

 When I first saw the class book my first reaction was, “What a great way to engage students with authentic writing and the teacher will have a picture of some new ideas the students learned while studying concepts about electricity.”  Let’s look closer at some of the book together…

Q   A good Question to ask Commonwealth Edison is: How much do we have to pay every day?

R   Batteries and electricity make a Radio play

Y  When you see an electrical fire you Yell for help!

Z   When you get Zapped from  static electricity you yelp.

So................ it's cute, but could it be so much more?

What if you taught a series of lessons in reading group about paraphrasing, and then used that strategy in science when the class made their book all about electricity?

What if you named the book:
                    "Our Thoughts As We Learned About Electricity."
Individual pages could be titled:

• A list of the most important things we learned
• Words and their meaning that we want to remember
• Diagrams that explain ideas that we now understand
• Connection that we made while we learned about electricity
• Other questions that we still have about electricity
• Photos with captions that show us learning during our unit 
• Experiments that helped us form new ideas

I picture a book filled with students photos with direct quotes written  next to their photo. I see student created diagrams and drawings. I would read "I wonder" statements, connections to their lives, and hopefully ... authentic writing. Lastly students from multigrade classes could work together to produce this class book. It wouldn't matter if you were a third or fourth grader.

What do you think?


Deborah