Hiding in Plain Sight

A read-aloud captures students’ attention. P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A U T H O R Using trade books to support science instruction is a timehonored tradition. A wellchosen book can generate interest in a science topic, present a problem, challenge misconceptions, and explain content. The Children’s Book Council and NSTA review hundreds of books yearly and publish their recommendations as the Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12 list (see Internet Resources). In addition, the Science and Children column Teaching Through Trade Books recommends two books per issue. These reliable resources often include ideas for using trade books to support science instruction. However, your school and classroom library collections are likely filled with other high-quality trade books not on these lists. These books are hiding in plain sight, just waiting to enrich your science teaching. Yet, deciding the best way to integrate these books in inquiry lessons can also be challenging. Using the right book in the wrong place in a lesson can prematurely shut down discussions, rob students of opportunities to make sense of their own observations, or reinforce common misconceptions. The 5E Instructional Model (Bybee 2014) structures and supports hands-on scientific inquiry across five phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. Considering this, we have uncovered parallel trade book features that can help you decide in which phase to use your favorite trade books (Table 1). In this article, we briefly review each phase of the 5E Instructional Model and explain how we select trade books and align literacy strategies to enhance each phase. In addition, we highlight some of our favorite books for each phase (Table 2, p. 82). You may notice that the lexile reading levels for a book may not always match the grade level of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) that we suggest for that book. Because many of these books are intended to be read aloud to the whole class, it is acceptable for the lexile reading levels to be higher than the grade level. Read-alouds encourage students to think about and beyond the text. Similarly, the illustrations, problems, and patterns within books that have lower lexile reading levels can often be used with older students to deepen their understanding of science concepts. The focus here is not to teach students how to read with these books but rather to use these books to help teach science concepts. However, “reading to teach” in science can support “teaching to read” in English language arts, as many aspects of scientific practice parallel metacognitive reading strategies, including making observations, predicting, inferring, comparing and contrasting, classifying, summarizing data, and recognizing cause-andeffect relationships (Fountas and Pinnell 2006; NGSS Lead States 2013).