Literacy and Social Studies Part 2, Chunking

 In my recent post on literacy and social studies I reviewed why teaching social studies improves literacy and talked about the "Write Your Way In/Out" strategy. I also promised to share some other strategies for imbedding literacy activities into your social studies units.  

Chunking

According to Edutopia, "Chunking information—breaking it down into manageable units and scaffolding it with activities—makes learning more accessible." Station activities are a great way to implement this strategy. In one of the lessons in Montana: A History of Our Home, students to "write their way in": "Would you have wanted to be a cowboy/girl on the open range?" Then they visit six different stations. Each station has a photograph or a short chunk of text for students to read and answer questions about. They use the information they've gathered at the stations to write a short essay about why they would, or would not, want to have been a cowhand.

You can easily set up a similar station activity using short excerpts of primary and secondary sources for any topic you are studying.

Chunking, another definition

According to Facing History & Ourselves, "the chunking reading strategy involves breaking down a difficult text into more manageable pieces and having students rewrite these “chunks” in their own words. You can use this strategy with challenging texts of any length. Chunking helps students identify key words and ideas, develops their ability to paraphrase, and makes it easier for them to organize and synthesize information."

This is a great strategy to use with legal documents, like treaties or constitutions. 

Here's one lesson that Salish Kootenai College Professor Tammy Elser created that uses chunking with treaties. In this lesson, students:

1. read the treaty by themselves highlighting words and phrases they don't know or understand.

2. read in small groups, defining words they don't know. 

3. read a third time, paraphrasing the treaty, article by article, in everyday language. 

4. Read the treaty (and their paraphrases) again, stopping at each article to answer the following questions: 

• What's in it for the Tribe? 
• What's in it for the non-Indian settlers? 
• What's in it for the US government.

At a workshop I attended with Tammy, we did an even easier version of this exercise: Each group only analyzed and summarized *one* article. After she checked to make sure our summaries accurately reflected the article, we shared our summaries to one another. 

Stay tuned for future posts featuring additional ways to imbed literacy and social studies.