Building schema, promoting critical thinking, enhancing communication skills, promoting cultural awareness, and cultivating curiosity. Have I gotten your attention yet? I’m sure I have! These are all aspects you want for your classroom and your students. So, how do you get them? Would you believe me if I said there’s one thing you can do to ensure that all five are happening inside your classroom? The secret is not skipping your content areas, such as social studies in third grade! Sadly, this happens all the time in elementary education, but science and social studies are vital to your students’ success. So, let’s dive deeper into these five benefits of why you should stop ignoring teaching content areas.
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Building Schema
This is the most important of the five focus elements when discovering why you should stop ignoring teaching context areas. The Science of Reading shows that one of the biggest proponents of student success in reading comprehension is our background knowledge. By ensuring we are explicitly teaching all content areas, we are building schema and broadening the horizons of students. Science and social studies expose students to a vast range of topics! So, the more we teach these subjects, the stronger the schema is within our students. This is a crucial way to help our students show growth in literacy!
Promote Critical Thinking
Reading teachers have a huge goal of promoting critical thinking in our students. We want students to be deep thinkers. We want them to analyze, evaluate, and critique. One of the best ways to do this is to focus on all content areas, such as science and social studies. Both of these subjects encourage students to think critically and analyze information. This occurs by having students ask questions on many topics, form hypotheses, and evaluate evidence. So, if we want students to read independently, teaching science and social studies is a natural way to do this!
Check out Science Smash Ups for amazing ways to incorporate science and reading!
Enhancing Communication Skills
Students studying science and social studies work on reading, writing, and presenting. So, it makes sense why you should stop ignoring teaching content areas! Students need to learn how to build their written and verbal communication skills.
Promote Cultural Awareness
Social studies helps expose students to different cultures, traditions, and historical events from around the world. By learning about this, students gain cultural awareness and the importance of sensitivity. Both of these aspects are crucial to our increasingly diverse and interconnected world.
Check out the Social Studies Units Bundle for excellent lessons and activities! Students will love social studies in third grade with these units.
Cultivating Curiosity
We want students to wonder about the world! When they are curious, they are more motivated to learn. So, if they are curious about a specific science or social studies topic, they will work to improve their reading comprehension. They will ask questions and explore sources, such as books in the library. Honestly, curiosity is a key component that helps drive motivation and their desire to learn.
It is absolutely crucial to focus on why you should stop ignoring teaching these content areas. Ultimately, skipping, ignoring, or not finding time to teach content areas does a complete disservice to our students. This is to their current self and future self. So, make sure to incorporate science and social studies into lessons to help students be successful future leaders of the world.
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