Social studies
Social studies is a field of study that is not confined to reading books, but it is an area that focuses on human behavior and relationships. Therefore, it is vital to integrate social studies into reading as it will help students develop a response to aspects of humanity. With a rich background in social studies, students find it easy to transform into responsible citizens of a given country. Another notable impact that social studies play is opening up the children to the global world as it helps them appreciate and easily interact with people from different cultures. Social studies are also used to improve students’ reading culture as well as their level of learning in that they can critically think when subjected to an issue and analyze the issue to come up with a suitable solution. Social studies have an aspect of economics embedded in it so that the students are taught how sound financial management is important in day to day life and that proper decisions have to be made for future endeavors. This paper will seek to analyze the vocabulary development and Socratics seminar as literacy strategies and further discuss graphic organizers.
Vocabulary development
Understanding of social studies has been impacted by many students’ inability to comprehend the vocabulary in which a given context is presented. Besides, students with a slow processing capacity or dyslexia experience difficulties in pronouncing words and breaking them into parts, making the reading of large texts completely difficult and overwhelming to them (Vidyasagar and Pammer, 2010). Clear and precise communication is the most effective of interacting and passing out information. To develop a clear rapport with students, verbal communication is key in a classroom setting. Therefore, teachers are encouraged to devise means by which the curriculum can be expanded to introduce new techniques that can be adopted in the development of vocabulary among the students.
Teachers can encourage the students to adopt a culture of using new words every day. It is said that it is easier to remember something that you see and often use; you are likely to remember it. The students should also use the new vocabularies they learn in writing. Another strategy that the teachers can use is morphology (Denton and Vaughn, 2010). By studying the internal structure of words, students are placed in a better place to shape their vocabulary and, consequently, expand it.
Socratic seminar
Socratic seminar is a mode of teaching in which open-ended discussions are used to engage with the students to expand their thinking and knowledge capacity (Knezic et al. 2010). Socrates was convinced that it was easier to educate a kid by giving them the freedom to think for themselves freely. In that regard, Socrates chose to use questions while responding to students’ concerns rather than direct answers. The questions prompted the students to think critically and eventually came up with solutions to their questions themselves. Socratic seminar is usually regarded as a form of discussion and not a debate. Thus the students are not allowed to raise their hands and hold side discussions. In this way, the discussion remains productive, and the students are likely to reach a consensus quickly.
Graphic organizer
The art of learning to read and write can be extremely devastating to students, and therefore, teachers play a pivotal role in helping them overcome these difficulties. The difficulties are prevalent in students who have some learning disabilities. Therefore, the graphic organizer strategy was invented to help the student learn the art of write sentences as early as elementary school and develop their skills to writing paragraphs and middle-level school and further write essays at high school. Graphic organizers help teachers arrange important information on a given topic based on given patterns and existing relations and consequently use it to identify with that given relationship (Manoli and Papadopoulou, 2012). Graphic organizers are advantageous, especially to underprivileged students. It helps them keep up with the rest of the students in terms of being organizers, and this aids in helping them contribute to their class discussions.
In conclusion, another strategy that can be used to reinforce the strategy is close reading. Through close reading, students are taught how to focus on the main idea in a passage. They are also given an opportunity of thinking aloud as a means of reflecting on the idea. Thinking aloud is just a way of showing what someone has understood from a passage by saying it aloud to the rest of the class. Close reading can also involve taking short notes in book margins. If all the above strategies are well implemented, they can help students shape their social status from a classroom setting to a larger society.
References
Denton, C. A., & Vaughn, S. (2010). Preventing and remediating reading difficulties. The promise of response to intervention: Evaluating current science and practice, 78-112.
Knezic, D., Wubbels, T., Elbers, E., & Hajer, M. (2010). The Socratic dialogue and teacher education. Teaching and teacher education, 26(4), 1104-1111.
Manoli, P., & Papadopoulou, M. (2012). Graphic organizers as a reading strategy: Research findings and issues. Creative education, 3(03), 348.
Vidyasagar, T. R., & Pammer, K. (2010). Dyslexia: a deficit in visuo-spatial attention, not in phonological processing. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(2), 57-63.
.