This is a list of fourteen strategies to help students develop their reading skills in social studies classes. There are different strategies such as, activate prior knowledge, determine the theme, use a visual, have students ask questions of themselves, and make inferences.

These are all great strategies to help students become better readers in your content area. They also talk about previewing text where there is a litany of questions to ask before you actually begin reading to better help students understand what they will be reading.

I really liked the strategy of questioning the author. This will bring the students into the reading. It will motivate them by them thinking that they are a part of the reading.

http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/score_lessons/content_area_literacy/

This was a great little article for myself. Sometimes I have a difficult time with the comprehension of specific things that I don't have a lot of knowledge about. In here it talks about becoming familiar with the national and state standards in the subject that you teach. This are like the bylaws of what you are going to be teaching, and you must make sure that you follow these directions.

Other things that you may want to use are graphic organizers to better help you develop your skills of a subject. Surround yourself with strong teachers. Use your media center and library to undertake research. These are only a few of the things on the list that they talked about in the article.

So I started to think these are the same things that students can do to help themselves become more familiar with the subject. Surround yourself with good help, use the library to help you better understand the topics in the classroom. Keep up with current events. These are all good strategies for a student to use when they are looking for a better literacy sense in the social studies classroom.

http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/subject/dev_content_literacy_ss.phtml

I loved this article, it talks about a mutual skill sets developed in different subject areas and how those should be emphasized. She talks about reading history for example, it should be read individually and also aloud. Then there should be a discussion about it, and also and examination of the facts and possibly reread. This is how you as a reader can develop the knowledge needed to understand a topic that you may be reading. Instead of developing state standards in a history class for example, maybe the English class that they are in can show them how to read different genres and different structures of text. This school seems to be one that is very different from the normal school setting they we live in today

http://www.nystromnet.com/index.cfm?fa=Teachers.07February

I just came across this website, and this great social studies instructional strategy guide. It talks about the hard time that students have with reading social studies textbooks. They have a teacher start off a usual school year on the first day having the students pull out their books and turning to page 1 chapter 1. Almost all of the students have lost interest or have no ambition to go forward. Instead of doing this "old way", the teacher now uses a new strategy that he learned. He will have the students open up the table of contents and with a partner go through the entire table of contents and come up with questions that hey want. He then passes out a scavenger hunt worksheet. With their partners the students must find the answers to the fifteen questions on the scavenger hunt. He tells them all of the answers are there and by working with their partners it will allow the students to better engage their thought processes and will help them develop better understanding of the material.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106010/chapters/Reading-Social-Studies-Texts.aspx

For my book review I went with "The Teaching for Understanding Guide" by Tina Blythe and Associates. I went with this book because it is a book that can help beginning teachers, and veteran teachers alike. This book is based on research done by three faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They are Howard Gardner, David Perkins, and Vito Perrone. They then called upon many other people in the field of education and they began working on this massive five year research project to help them understand what would best help students understand what it was they were learning. Too many times students will only retain information for a test, and then it is on to the next chapter and the information from the previous test is lost seemingly forever. This book does not go into the research that was done rather this book is all about the main ideas and framework to help teachers to get their students to understand what they are teaching them. Another great thing about this book is it isn't a book that needs to be read in order. If you need to jump around from topic to topic feel free.

Within the book there are basically four sub categories that the book is divided up into Generative Topics, Understanding Goals, Performances of Understanding, and Ongoing Assessment. To go along with these four categories they give you examples from the classroom, and feedback from teachers and students on how they felt about what they did.

First off is Generative Topics. This really lets the teacher and the students delve deep into a topic. Generative topics are basically issues, different themes, ideas, and concepts that allow a variety of different perspectives to support development of powerful understanding. Instead of just reading chapters from a book and having the teacher tell the students about the American Civil War for instance. The generative topic whatever it may be will allow the students to get a greater understanding by getting inside of different subtopics off of the main topic of the Civil War. Another great feature of generative topics is it something that highly interests the teacher and the students, and the more controversial of a topic the better.

The next topic of discussion is Understanding Goals. Before you start a unit or course you need to have goals set. This will allow the students as well as the teacher to know right from the start what it is they want and need to accomplish to meet the goals. When you're beginning a new unit or even a school year it can greatly help by going over these things with other teachers in your department. This will allow you as the teacher to see more clearly what it is that you want the students to accomplish by taking this course or unit. This is a great one for veteran teachers who are now trying to get a better understanding for teaching for understanding. Instead of your old way of doing things the same way over and over again, try making some goals that lead to higher thinking and an understanding of the students. This will bring closure and an understanding for the students.

Next topic in the book is Performances of Understanding. They talked about a great of example in the book about learning how to drive a car and do all of the things associated with driving a car from a book. By studying diagrams of where everything is and you memorize how far it takes for the car to slow down under breaking. This is all well and good, but you don't have the same understanding as if you were behind the wheel yourself. So many different circumstances can come your way that you can't read about how to react in a book. You need to be on the road to practice driving under different conditions with feedback from an instructor to be able to learn how to drive effectively. This is the same way in school. There are many facts and pieces of knowledge that a student can learn from a book, but they need to be able to apply that knowledge in a variety of different circumstances, and they do this with the guide of an instructor. This is the basis for the performance of understanding. In performance for understanding students need to go beyond the things that they in, in the classroom. They need to be able to create new ideas and extrapolating on what they already know. This is in essence what the teaching for understanding is. The students can take the information that the teacher is giving them and then can manipulate that information into many different things. They will understand the ins and outs of what the teacher is presenting them.

Finally the book speaks ongoing assessment. Ongoing assessment is not giving the students a test at the end of the unit. It also isn't playing a game of jeopardy with the students. Ongoing assessment is such a large role in the teaching for understanding. By always assessing the students each class period multiple times in different forms it let the teacher know that the students understand what they are doing. If you need to go back over things it is easy to find those things out by ongoing assessment. The biggest favor a teacher can ever do in my opinion is giving them feedback. This will allow the students and the teacher to understand what needs to be done for the student to get a better understanding.

I believe the teaching for understanding is a great tool for teachers to use to help their students not only be able to learn something, but to know how to implement what they have learned in many different ways. This book will give you the framework needed to implement the teacher for understanding method. I love that the book is quick and to the point with little fluff, you can hop around until you find the spot in the book that you need. They aren't trying to reinvent the wheel with this book. This book is something that teachers should use to help build upon the great things that they are already implementing in their classroom. This model is an easy model to follow, and it is a great tool to share amongst colleagues.

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Understanding-Guide-Jossey-Education/dp/0787909939/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329769688&sr=1-1

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/34649/

I read a journal article from reading rockets.org. The article was titled 10 Strategies to Enhance Students' memory. I believe that we need to remember as students growing up we are learning so much that we are like sponges trying to take it all in. This is the time in an individual's life that the demands on their memory are at their peak. Just like it was stated in the article as adults we have already acquired the knowledge that we need to live our day to day lives.

I myself can relate to this topic, as they stated in the article at times a student may be doing a reading of say 3 paragraphs, and by the time they get to the third paragraph they forget what it was they read in the first paragraph. This can be very difficult for the reader to handle for the reader and can cause a lot of rereading and even more confusion as to what it was they previously were reading.

Another example they were citing in the reading is when the teacher is giving the student instructions on how to perform a task or information that they have just went over in class. This is where the students are having difficulty with their working memory. One of the 10 strategies that are talked about in the article would greatly help teachers when giving directions is to give students directions in multiple formats. This can be done by telling them the directions and visually showing them an example, which is used in a number of different strategies. Have the students visualize or make a visual cue to help them remember a topic. Having the students develop cue's for information makes it easier for them to retrieve that information. You can also have the student explain back the directions to you so they have a better understanding.

I like the idea of teaching over learning; this will show the students that more and more repetitions will give them a better mastery of the subject they are learning. I believe sometimes we are constrained by time, but if we can have the students perform this task it will drive the point home for them. To go hand in hand with this they talk about making the students become active readers. This will enhance short term and working memory. To help the students memories while reading they should highlight or take down words that will help them remember their reading.

I found it very interesting that providing students with practice tests will help them with their long term memory. It will help them with recalling information that they have been studying for a long period of time. I am thinking this will only work for younger students as the farther you get along in school the higher the stakes become on taking tests, and I don't believe teachers would allow practice tests.

The last thing that they spoke of really made a lot of sense. It is very helpful to review material before going to sleep. Research has shown that information that is studied at night before going to bed is better remembered. Just make sure you brush your teeth before reviewing because anything done after the review will interfere with the memory of the review.

I think these 10 strategies to enhance students' memory are a very good exercise and step in the right direction for the student to be able to remember things for the short term and the long term. If these guidelines were followed by teachers, students, and parents I believe it would greatly benefit the reading, studying, and memorization of students. This needs to be done at a very young age to build the groundwork for a good student.

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/33920/

For my first journal article I too went to readingrockets.org and picked one of the many articles that are very helpful in reading. This article ties in with part of my initial introduction where I stated I had a difficult time comprehending readings when I didn't know much at all about the topic. This article can be found under the reading comprehension section and it is titled, Building World Knowledge: Motivating Children to Read and Enjoy Informational Text.

I think this article does a great job of giving teachers a framework for helping younger students in the case of this article, but I believe this basic framework could be used for just about anybody. There have been some recent studies about children in kindergarten and 1st grade preferring to read nonfiction. By the time they reach fourth grade they lack the necessary skills to read the much more informal textbooks. In this article they use three instructional techniques to help students understand and enjoy the informal texts. The three techniques they talk about are Text impression, Guided Questions, and Retelling Pyramid.

Text impressions is a way to throw out some vocabulary words that will be used in the text most are probably new to the students. They then discuss what they know about those words and in what context they can be used.

Guided Questions set a purpose during reading. I don't how many countless times that I have set off reading something and not had a purpose. Well my purpose is to get done. Well that just isn't a great purpose now is it? This is a time when you can set up questions, and they had a link to a think called the Qmatrix that I found to be a little interesting. It is helpful in writing three different forms of questions, literal, inferential, and extended.

Retelling Pyramid is a nice tool to use at the end of the reading. The pyramid is used to prompt the students about specific items from the reading. In the article it is used in comparing and contrasting a giraffe and a penguin.

I found this article to be very helpful in introductory ways to helping young students being introduced to new informal readings. Like I said earlier I think It can be adapted across any scale of reading when coming across new material that is difficult to comprehend. Instead of wasting your time just reading something to read it, this article shows if you don't know much about the topic your reading about you need to have a purpose and a plan of attack to be able to comprehend the reading.