Science and Literacy

I suppose I've seen the necessary connection between science and literacy since I began my pre-service work.  Returning to school for teaching, I was in a K-8 program with a fairly heavy emphasis on reading.  Most of my classmates were concentrating on self-contained elementary areas but I was always leaning towards science.  I also had issues with "when am I going to use this stuff", mainly because the emphasis on reading was centered around fiction and not non-fiction or informational works.  I had left a career were part of my job requirements were research and writing informational reports for government documents.  I've always felt that students needed to have informational literacy in order to be successful in college and the world beyond.  Last fall I was part of a group from our school who attended a conference on the Common Core State Standards.  I was impressed by their overarching goal that (ideally) all students will be ready for college or career training by the time they graduate.  As for including the new CCSS literacy standards into science, I don't see that as too much of a jump.  Most of what is there are things that I'm sure we all do anyway, or would do more of with some guidelines to follow.  I also like the idea of connecting my classes more with language arts so that my students get the point that just because this isn't your writing class, it doesn't mean that you don't have to use proper punctuation.  

I found the article, Science and Literacy, Tools for Life, interesting and informative.  Posting performance expectations, or learning targets, is expected by my principal although I am working on rewriting ours into more student friendly language.  I've been to training for Sheltered Instruction, Observation Protocol (SIOP) and along with the performance expectation they include a communication expectation, or how will you show what you've learned.  This is something else I'd like to include in my classroom strategies.  I found the writing section in Tools for Life somewhat limiting for my classroom situation.  Students taking notes in their text books isn't possible.  Some of the writing strategies might work with inquiry-type situations and materials, I'll have to think about them in the arena of my inquiry class.  My favorite part of the article was the metacognition section.  Like everyone, I've heard of the benefits of metacognition for students but I haven't seen many concrete examples to get students started with the process.  I think that the cues for metacognitive conversations in small groups will be helpful in my classroom.