Luke's Blog

This blog is written by Amy Menzi. She has been a teacher for more than twenty years, and she creates integrated units and hands-on learning experiences that teachers and students can utilize.  https://amymezni.blogspot.com/2018/01/6-reading-strategies-you-need-to-teach.html In this blog, Menzi highlights six reading strategies that you need to teach in social studies. These reading strategies are vocab and vernacularisms, identifying bias and propaganda, close reading, author’s purpose, cause and effect, and historical perspective. I believe that teaching these strategies in a social studies classroom could assist students in understanding difficult readings or even understanding words on an exam. Social studies readings can be complex, but these effective strategies identified could assist students in understanding content.  111 words 

Reading is arguably the most important skill that someone can develop throughout their learning and growth process. “Reading is more than decoding” text to discover answers, but it is a process to comprehend, understand, and evaluate a text (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, p. 28). In the reading process, there are many steps that a smart reader should utilize to best comprehend a text. For example, a smart reader should develop questions, visualize and hypothesize, and evaluate the text. Even though these seem like relatively simple tasks to perform while reading, many students could struggle with their own process. These struggles could result directly from not having sufficient prior knowledge on a specific subject connected to a reading. For example, I can recall moments in my school career where I was given a reading where I was only tasked with finding answers to questions by progressing through the text. I did not have sufficient prior knowledge on the subject, and I was not fully c...