1st Grade Phonics Meets 6th Grade Math

So you’re teaching Math in a 6^th grade classroom, how does 1^st grade Reading affect you at all? This week’s reading from the Graves textbook focuses on how primary students start to become readers, from pronouncing sounds to learning the alphabet. This might not seem obviously connected to middle school classes, other than Reading of course, but the two might be more connect than we think right away.

Of course there is the obvious connection: If students don’t learn to read properly in the primary grades, doing their reading for their classes by the time they reach middle school is going to be a struggle, both frustrating for the student and you as a teacher. But how can the methods Graves describes to teach phonics and letter recognition be related to upper grades? My theory is this, most students in my future classroom will already have a pretty strong foundation in reading, but there is no such thing as too strong of a foundation. Maybe I won’t be helping students with phonological awareness activities or letter-sounding, but writing and reading can easily fit into my classroom. Maybe instead of reading a story book aloud, I could read a more complicated story problem aloud and treat it as if it were a book. Graves mentions about stopping mid-book to, “Briefly define the new vocabulary and model one or more strategies. You might ask a question, clarify something that is difficult to understand, make a prediction, or solicit questions and comments from the children” (175), which is completely applicable to solving story problems! If I treat story problems as a story, stopping to ask questions or explain confusing statements, reading story problems is certainly a way of reading aloud. It might not seem the same, because we would be focusing on elements of our math problem, not how to say and spell words, but my 11 year old students would be getting some of the same reading benefits that 6 year olds get from being read to by their teacher.

This is precisely what Chapter 2 of Creating Literacy-Rich Environments for Adolescents was emphasizing—connecting subjects in a visible way to students to follow and learn from. It gave the story of how one high school created connections in how classes were taught by keeping things consistent from class to class in terms of note taking, vocabulary, writing, and other elements of school. Imagine, if I started every Math class with a story problem, and English started class with a poem or short story, and Social Studies started class with a first-person account of what they would be studying that day, every class would start the same way, with reading aloud!
Reading out loud as a class isn’t the only possible connection. Beginning readers are encouraged to practice their writing, even when they don’t know how to spell words “properly.” Isn’t that just like the math concept of showing your work so teachers can see your thought process? What about having an exit slip in a math class or a “crystal ball” prediction during science lab to get students writing? (Ivey & Fisher 47) It may not be the most apparent connection in the world, but I think the way we teach and reinforce basic reading skills is completely related to how we teach different subjects to older students.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ivey, G. &. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.