Framing our Reading Part 4: Vocabulary and Concept Development

Concept	Text Link	Rationale for Choosing	Text Frame (s)	Strategies Used (and Resource)
Biodiversity	Studying how climate affects biodiversity	This article discusses the changes in biodiversity due to climate.	Concept/Definition	Power Notes (Buehl)
Bacteria	How a bacteria cell recognizes its own DNA	This article describes a bacteria cell's replication and how it identifies its DNA from an enemy cell. This article draws on past knowledge and relates bacteria cells to Biology and the real world.	Goal/Action/Outcome Making Connections	K-W-L (McLaughlin and Buehl)
Atoms	How many gold atoms make gold metal?	This article combines math, biology, chemistry, and engineering to show how new discoveries can revolutionize technology.  This article explores nanometer-sized pieces of gold and their electronic changes.  This can help make new discoveries in bioimaging and sensing.	Concept/definition  Compare/contrast	Connection Stems (McLaughlin)

For this week in Framing our Reading, my partner Samantha and I were to revisit the previous three weeks’ articles and choose a key term from each of the articles.  We chose Biodiversity from the most recent article, Bacteria from Week 2, and Atom from the first week.  Now that we chose the terms, we each decided on a graphic organizer to teach these terms.

The graphic organizer that I chose was the semantic map (McLaughlin, 2015).  McLaughlin suggest using Semantic Maps to “activate prior knowledge, introduce content-specific vocabulary, and organize information about a topic.”  Semantic Maps are simple to both use and teach.  The steps for completing a map is as follows:

1)    Pick a word you don’t know from the text.

2)    Write this word in the middle of a piece of paper and draw an ellipse around it.

3)    Make a list of words and phrases related to the target word.

4)    Group items from the list into categories.  Connect this category to the target word and list the items from the list under the category.

An example of biodiversity for two of the terms is shown in the picture above.  I like that there is a lot of brainstorming involved in this type of graphic organizer.  I also like that it encourages students to think outside of the box and make connections to previous knowledge.  I am not a pro at using this graphic organizer, as I would much rather make a list like I did with the Power notes from week 3.  I sometimes found it difficult to come up with an appropriate category and would have preferred if the categories were given to me.  I don’t believe this graphic organizer works with all types of vocab, but I believe that it is an extremely useful tool for visual learners.  I also like that there is not much necessary planning involved and a teacher can quickly tell students to make a Semantic Map for a vocabulary word that might come up in the middle of a lesson.

To see these words being used with a different graphic organizer, check out my partner Samantha’s blog post.

Work Cited

Buehl, D., (2014) Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning, 4^th ed. International Reading Association.

Weizmann Institute of Science. (2015, April 13). How a bacterial cell recognizes its own DNA.ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 18, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150413130825.htm

Uppsala Universitet. (2015, April 16). Studying how climate affects biodiversity. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 20, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150416132038.htm

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Comprehending Content Area Text. In Content area reading: Teaching and learning for college and career readiness (2nd ed., pp. 57-62). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Suomen Akatemia (Academy of Finland). (2015, April 10). How many gold atoms make gold metal?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 11, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150410083516.htm