Integrating content-area and literacy instruction in primary-grade classrooms creates authentic and engaging opportunities for students to build background knowledge and literacy skills. Furthermore, when students engage in meaningful dialogue about content-area topics they can discuss complex ideas and use content-specific vocabulary. These…

In this column, we focus on the planning aspects that are important for students to learn content well. We include a discussion of transfer goals, learning intentions, and success criteria.

Understanding, reading, and writing using academic language has increasingly become a focus in our schools. One of the salient features of academic vocabulary is morphological complexity. Many words are considered derivationally morphologically complex, meaning they have roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Affixes can be challenging for students as…