Beryl Irene Bailey

Dr. Beryl Irene Bailey is the Director of Literacy for Bloomfield, CT Public Schools and founder of From Pages to Pedagogy, LLC. She holds a certificate of clinical competence from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association and certifications in elementary and special education, and administration and supervision. Dr. Bailey is a national literacy consultant and has been published in the International Literacy Association’s Literacy Today magazine.

Feeding Two Birds with One Worm: Using CLOSE Reading for Science and Literacy

The eight Science and Engineering Practices present as complex text for students and teachers. They are a blueprint for engaging in inquiry, experimentation, evidence gathering and explanation. Now, more than ever elementary educators need to be engaged in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. This workshop will promote the use of science-based children’s literature to teach the science practices and promote comprehension.

The Science and Engineering Practices present as complex text for students and teachers. They are a blueprint for engaging in inquiry, experimentation, evidence gathering and explanation. Collectively, the practices can be organized into a flow chart documenting a sequence of behaviors in which scientists and engineers engage. The last practice, Obtaining, evaluating and communicating information serves as a summary of what was completed in practices one through seven.

Numerically stated, the science and engineering practices require that educators and students learn to execute some 45 skills and comprehend a myriad of academic and domain specific vocabulary. Elementary educators are already tasked with learning and implementing ELA and Math standards as well as creating instructional and assessment protocols to measure student learning. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSSs) have recently been added to their job description.

With the increase of content-based standards, schools have witnessed a rise in teacher anxiety and a reduction in their productive disposition. Educators no longer believe that they can effectively donate enough time to each discipline to impact student learning.

How do we move from instructional excess to instructional excellence? How do we bridge the long-standing divide between content areas? How do we contextualize the college and career ready standards and the science and engineering practices so that they become more than decontextualized and isolated skills, facts and figures?

This workshop will promote interdisciplinary teaching and learning through Bailey’s CLOSE Reading process, which teaches students to become sentence surgeons and dissect text using five neon-colored highlighters.

Goal: Provide elementary teachers with an interdisciplinary approach to scientific writing and mathematical problem solving through the CLOSE reading of STEM related Children’s literature.

Objective: Develop inquiry, numeracy, problem solving and written communication skills within students through the CLOSE reading of science related mentor text and text dependent questions.