What Is Literacy And Literacy?

I teach Hebrew reading to children in Kindergarten through third grade, working individually and in small groups with students who have difficulty in the classroom. In addition, I privately tutor students with learning disabilities in math. The school that I work in is an Orthodox Jewish school with over 1,000 students in Kindergarten through eighth grade.

Content Area Literacy is the term used to describe the reading done in subjects other than language arts. I chose the term literacy, rather than reading, because literacy encompasses all of the necessary elements in the field of reading. While informed professionals understand that reading is not simply decoding words, many teachers are ignorant of this fact. McClure, Garthwait, and Kristo

Strategies necessary to comprehend informational text are different from those needed to comprehend literature (source), and since adults primarily read informational texts, these skills will be beneficial as students grow older (Kane, 2008). Moreover, since prior knowledge is necessary to understand texts (source), each subject requires its own reading skills. Additionally, literacy does not only refer to reading. Literacy also refers to writing, discussing, and becoming fluent in the specific subject area. The original curriculum for my Hebrew reading classes only covered decoding. Yet, as I personalized my classes more, I began incorporating other aspects of literacy, including comprehension, writing, and discussion, and I noticed a vast improvement in my students’ overall learning. With my math students, too, as I incorporated different aspects of literacy related to my students’ personal learning styles, I noticed further

In a classroom, the class is a single unit, and teachers teach to the class’s needs, rather than to each individual students’ needs. I enjoy being able to work individually with students in order to cater my teaching toward each one’s specific needs so that I can instill them with passion for each subject.

Content area literacy, as with all learning, should directly relate to the students’ lives. When students can relate to a subject, they retain the information better and are more excited to learn. Relating subjects to students’ lives provides them with the desire to participate in the lesson and make connections with previous experiences. Lee (2014) wrote that “culture is the primary medium through which humans learn” (p. 10). Connecting the readings to students’ lives helps them activate their prior knowledge of culture and experience and allows them to transfer it to their learning.

Graves stated that if a teacher does not know ten things about a student, the teacher does not know the student well enough (as cited by Daniels & Zemelman, 2014). Daniels and Zemelman (2014) implore teachers to conduct interest surveys with students in order to be able to relate the learning to the students’