This article is a piece that I think all elementary educators should read. I really like how it stressed the importance of exposing lower grades to expository informational text. As a pre-service teacher with a science endorsement, I strongly agree with the content of this article.
I have started collecting children books from Scholastic book orders, yard sales, and as gifts. When I first started buying books, I just got books that I thought "looked" fun or cute. But since going through Intro and Intermediate Blocks at USM, my knowledge of books has grown tremendously. I have started looking more closely at what children's books say and how the author tells the story. When I look at informational books, I try to look at them from a child's point of view. Questions that come to mind are: "Can a child understand the content?", "Is the content in this book accurate and up-to-date?", and "Will a child learn something from this book?".
I have never thought about the phrase 'reading to learn'. I guess I just assumed that 'obviously, when a child reads a book about a subject that they would learn something'. Needless to say, after reading this article I am no longer THAT naive. The statistics and references that Moss provided in the article reinforced the importance of content area literacy.
When I am (finally) a teacher, no matter what grade(s) I teach, I can honestly say that my classroom library will be filled with expository informational texts BECAUSE of this article.
Two questions that come to mind after reading Moss' article are (1) Why isn't this a bigger issue? and (2) Why aren't teachers more concerned with content area literacy?
