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Hello!

I am a pre-service teacher at the University of Arkansas. I wanted to know what are some of your favorite ways to incorporate reading, writing and/or math in your science lessons? Do you find it challenging to do so? Do your students seem to like it? Do you incorporate all three or just one at a time?

Thanks,

Sarah Hendley

Hi Sarah! I teach third grade and there are a few different ways I incorporate reading, writing, and math into our science lessons. Luckily, there is a lot of readily available resources for our NGSS standards and this takes a lot of the prep time out of the equation for me. Providing supplementary reading to your lessons helps incorporate not only reading but can incorporate writing as well if you have your students write on what they’ve read and learned. Reading and writing practice can be sprinkled throughout the science lessons, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel but rather play off of what you already have. For example, one of my standards covers the life cycle of organisms. Students can read about an organism, annotate their reading, and form a paragraph on the life cycle of that given organism. Math can be incorporated in percentages, graphs, fractions in a variety of different ways. Students should have this background knowledge already as trying to teach both a new math and science concept can be difficult to students depending on their age/grade.

Hi Sarah!

When I incorporate reading, writing, and math into my science lessons, I like to choose one topic. For example, I will read nonfiction texts on different kind of plants. The students will write on similarities and differences of the plants. This can also be used in a science lesson/experiment where students get to plant their plants. The students can create investigations on what plants need to grow. I hope that helps! There's a lot of resources online that allow you to incorporate reading and science together.