SOCIAL STUDIES
READING AND WRITING SKILL MAP FOR TEACHERS*
Directions: This chart is designed to help you keep track of student reading and writing skill applications in your Social Studies class. As students
practice and use these skills place a check mark n the appropriate box that corresponds to the cycle and skill. This will help you see the gaps,
repetitions and prospective areas of focus as you design units in each cycle. In any given unit there could be many skills that students are asked to
apply.
Students will acquire, develop and apply essential reading and writing skills to their study of Social Studies.
Comprehension
1. Read to get literal meaning.
2. Use Chapter and section headings, topic
sentences, and other strategies to select main
ideas.
3. Select passages that are pertinent to the topic
being studied.
4. Interpret what is read by drawing inferences.
5. Detect cause and effect relationships.
6. Use visual clues and captions to aid
comprehension.
7. Read for a variety of purposes: critically,
analytically, to find information to support
an argument, to answer a question, to form
an opinion, to skim for facts.
8. Distinguish between fact and opinion:
recognize author bias.
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Vocabulary
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9. Use word attack skills: sight recognition,
phonetic analysis, structural analysis.
10. Use context clues to gain meaning.
11. Use appropriate sources to gain meaning of
essential terms and vocabulary.
12. Recognize and understand as increasing
number of social studies terms.
Writing
13. Paraphrase reading passages.
14. Write summaries of reading passages.
15. Write a response to a writing prompt.
16. Take organized notes while listening and
reading.
17. Write persuasive letters, essays and position
papers.
18. Write to inform, describe and narrate.
* From National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Task Force on Scope and Sequence.
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