So what’s an AoW? An Article of the Week (AoW) is author Kelly Gallagher’s way of helping students build prior knowledge, and it’s a great way to add informational texts to your ELA or content-area classroom. As Kelly says, “You need to know stuff to read stuff.” In other words, if you don’t know what Al Qaeda is, you’re liable to read something mentioning Al Qaeda and ask, “Who is this Al guy?” (This actually happened in one of Kelly’s classes.) At Kelly’s school, teachers at each grade level selects articles each week.
Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students’ prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text.
-Kelly Gallagher
Example of an AoW Structure below
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