Click on the link above to view a great video from the professional development library on the PBS Learning Media website.
In this video teacher Susan Christy (Highlands Middle School, Ft. Thomas, Ky.) is teaching a lesson on the Neolithic Revolution to her seventh-grade social studies students, using scaffolding and differentiation to address the needs of students with literacy challenges.
When planning the unit, Susan selects challenging vocabulary the students will encounter and writes a definition for each word using children’s and collegiate dictionaries. She introduces the vocabulary list and provides multiple opportunities for the students to engage with the words before they read the text, including a pre-test, a “sing and guess” activity, and an application activity in which students can demonstrate they understand and can use the selected vocabulary before they encounter the words in the text.
This video was originally part of a multimedia professional development resource, Literacy Without Limits, produced by KET in 2007 in collaboration with the Kentucky Department of Education.
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