Literacy Practices

Use this lesson plan and the provided template to have your students practice the 3-2-1 strategy. This literacy strategy is a quick way to check students’ understanding of a concept, reading or lesson. It helps them summarize and organize their thoughts by listing three responses to one prompt, two responses to another prompt and one response to a final prompt.

Use this lesson plan and the provided template to have your students practice creating concept maps for any article. This literacy strategy boosts critical thinking and reading retention by having students organize information and connect important ideas, concepts and terms.

According to a 2022 study, people in the United States often included Thanksgiving as an event important to the country’s foundation along with the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, the Civil War and British colonization. But the events in most people’s narrative of the first Thanksgiving run contrary to history. Thanksgiving myths abound because their memory is rooted in story. While such origin stories tend to unify people, they sometimes misrepresent the truth. Tidy tales of history sometimes appear in books and museum exhibits, preserving the group narrative and identity.

Use this lesson plan and the provided template to have your students practice the Cornell Note-taking System with any article. This literacy strategy organizes notes into two columns that provide structure for note-taking, analysis and review and that will help increase students’ learning, comprehension and retention.

Students will work in groups to answer questions about graphs and data visualizations. Then, they will discuss data literacy and how graphs can promote misinformation

Working in a social group provides a variety of benefits, including the ability to learn from others and share resources. However, disadvantages can also come with working in a social group. In this activity, students will brainstorm and discuss the pros and cons of social behaviors in a variety of realistic situations. After considering how disturbances affect social behaviors, students will write a paper that evaluates the relationship between disturbances, social behaviors, and population distributions.

Have you ever wondered how the people who get to fly in space are chosen? The path to becoming an astronaut has changed a lot over the years. In this activity, students will learn about the space travelers of the past and present — and consider a future where the diversity of astronauts better reflects the diversity of all of humankind. Students will use their creative writing skills to imagine this future.

Are your students creeped out by spiders? They aren’t alone. In this guide, students will learn about how inaccurate news coverage has promoted common misconceptions about the largely harmless critters. Students can also discuss misinformation, thinking about where they’ve encountered it before, its impacts and ways to correct it.   

Let spiders and their unfair reputation help you teach students about identifying and correcting misinformation. Learning outcomes: Media literacy, communicating information.

Students will answer questions about the online Science News article “News stories have caught spiders in a web of misinformation,” which describes new research looking at how spiders are portrayed by the media. A version of the article, “News stories give spiders a bum rap” appears in the September 24, 2022 issue of Science News.

In this activity, students will discuss how literary devices can be used to convey scientific concepts, research how an animal of their choice senses the world and compose a piece of creative writing based on what they find.

Students will answer claim, evidence and reasoning questions about the online Science News article “The Age of Dinosaurs may have ended in springtime.” The article describes how scientists used fossilized fish to determine what season it was when an asteroid wiped out nonavian dinosaurs. A version of the article, “Dinosaur killer may have hit in spring,” appears in the March 26, 2022 issue of Science News.