Once Upon a Life Science Book: 12 Interdisciplinary Activities to Create Confident Readers

As the great Dr. Seuss once said, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” In Jodi Wheeler-Toppen’s new book, Interdisciplinary Activities to Create Confident Readers, she utilizes the parallels between how people learn science and how people become better readers. This book is geared towards teachers of middle and high school life science who want to improve students’ reading abilities while supporting science content learning. In her quest to create confident readers, Wheeler-Toppen strategically organized this book by lessons, which consist of an activity, a reading based on an important life science concept (as defined by the National Science Education Standards), and an application that asks to correlate the activity with the reading. Wheeler-Toppen’s inclusion of the three-phase learning cycle, which consists of exploration, concept introduction and concept application, is established on the notion that students’ base new knowledge on information they already have. This interdisciplinary book will ensure that your students’ improve their reading skills, increase their science knowledge and become more confident learners.