Integrating Literacy and Engineering Instruction for Young Learners

• Published in: The Reading teacher Vol. 69; no. 1; pp. 25 - 33
• Main Authors: Wilson-Lopez, Amy, Gregory, Stacie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newark Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.07.2015; International Literacy Association; Wiley-Blackwell
• Subjects: Action research; Action research, teacher research; and materials; Assessment; Childhood; Children's literature; Comprehension; Content literacy; Early adolescence; Elementary Education; Elementary School Students; Engineering; Engineering Education; etc.; Fiction; Inferences; Informational text; Instructional strategies; Instructional strategies, teaching strategies; Interdisciplinary Approach; Learning strategies; Literacy; Literacy Education; Literature; Making inferences; methods; National Standards; Nonfiction; Predicting; Problem Solving; Questioning; Reading; Reading Comprehension; Reading Instruction; Reading Strategies; Research methodology; Rubrics; Selection criteria; Specific subject areas (math; Specific subject areas (math, art, etc.); Strategies; Strategies, methods, and materials; Summarizing; Supplementary resources; teacher research; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching Methods; teaching strategies; text features; Text types; Text types, text features; Units of Study; Writing; Writing across the curriculum; Writing strategies; Writing to learn
• ISSN: 0034-0561; 1936-2714
• DOI: 10.1002/trtr.1351

According to recently published national standards, elementary students should engage in engineering design activities. This article outlines ways that teachers can use literacy instruction to support young students’ engineering design activity, such as by selecting texts in which characters face problems that can be solved through engineering, providing students with opportunities to practice comprehension strategies while reading those texts, and modeling for them how to write a variety of texts that are relevant to engineers’ practices. The authors describe how they integrated this type of literacy instruction into engineering units in third‐ and fifth‐grade classrooms.