Corben's Blog - Content Area Literacies for Middle Grades

Teaching History is a great resource for teachers. The website has teaching materials, history content, and many practices. The website offers material for elementary, middle and high school. When you click on teaching materials, it gives you many different links to lesson plan reviews and many teaching guides. Teaching History gives many different topics to choose from. When you click on history content, it brings you to a link that shows a link for website reviews, a link that is for multiple types of other texts, a list of history quizzes and national resources. The website reviews section helps you to find quality websites as well as primary sources. Beyond the text gives a different point of view than a traditional textbook. The history quiz section gives a list of pre-made quizzes of many topics. The national resources gives a list of different federal teaching resources like the Smithsonian. The last tab, best practices, also gives lots of helpful tools. For example, th...

This week’s reading and recently in class we have been discussing book clubs. Before this I have never considered a book club for a non-literature class. In my prior years of school I had never experienced this idea either. After reading this section, I have come to favor the idea. I think that the small groups allow for students to better pitch their ideas. This also allows for more creativity. Since there are not as many people in the group as opposed to the whole class, each student is then forced to think harder and more outside of the box. However, book clubs can also not be a great idea. As I have experienced in past group projects, some students to not do their part. It is obvious when they do not read. Therefore the student is then piggybacking off of other student’s suggestions. With small groups this could be a major set back. If a group consists of 3 people, this would mean that a third of the group did not do their part. And even though the teacher could make thi...

Being a teacher comes with a limited budget. Having to find, print and learn lessons can be expensive. Finding free resources is a great tool to have as well as letting other people use it.  Teaching Tolerance is a great resource for teachers. It is a social studies resource. Teaching Tolerance gives updates on current news as well as also having classroom resources for teachers. When you drop down under the classroom resources section tab, lessons, learning plans, student text, student tasks, teaching strategies and many more come up. The lesson can be searched by specific lesson topics. Another option is a more specific search. You can search by grade level, subject, social justice domain or by topic. This would be a great resource for teachers because it is a free and detailed resource. If you click on a topic it will give you related resources, like texts and worksheets. Being a social studies teacher, I could see myself using this resource in my classroom because of the e...

SUMMARIZE: Science and English go together well. Though they do not cross, there are many ways to interconnect the two subjects. The text gave many literary examples that prove connection between Science and literature. One teacher talked about a book and tried to determine what was “real science” and what was “fake science”. This allowed the students to make connections and have better understanding of the material that was being taught or discussed. MAKE CONNECTIONS: There were many parts of the text I connected to. For example, the first connection I made was Albert Einstein. Einstein is introduced to many students at a young age, just for being smart. Another connection was Steven Hawking, a very smart yet disabled man. Carl Sagan was a man that I have heard about a few times in science classes, yet cannot define exactly who he is. A movie reference I noticed was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . The words following this was easy for me to connect with, as I have seen the mov...

iCivics is a website that offers many resources for teachers. It organizes specific topics by units. I think this would be a good website for teachers to use because it is kid friendly. It is kid friendly in the aspect of the design. The characters and features of the videos and games are cartoons. This might allow for the students to not think of the information as school information, but rather a TV show or movie. This aspect also allows for the teacher to keep the students engaged. The teacher can search under a specific content or by standards. The best part is it is all free! The website is ran on donations and this is what keeps the information public.  All of the files are accessible once the teacher makes an account. Once you click on the link. It will take you to a google drive filled with multiple activities, charts, mini quizzes and readings for the students and teachers. This resource also has resources that satisfy learning objectives for high school classr...

  This week’s reading was about textbooks. As a social studies and science teacher, textbooks are a really good resource. They are a way to go over the text and information that is needed for the lesson. But, I also know that textbooks can be boring for most students, including myself. So for me as a future teacher, it is important to make sure the students are involved and engaged with the text.   I always found popcorn reading a way to keep me involved with the text. This is one method that supports what the author suggests as a good tool for classroom reading. They suggested to have the students “work in pairs, groups and teams at all stages of reading.” Working in groups would allow the students to have discussions after the reading to make sure that each of the students understood the reading or if not, the students are able to build off of other student’s prior knowledge or new knowledge of the text. I also think that using textbooks that have websites that assis...