In the elementary grades, content area literacy can be defined as understanding and being able to explain ideas from a text. Students in elementary school are skilled at “fake reading” by going through a text and finding the answers or skimming through enough of it to understand what they believe to be the main idea. Teachers of elementary grades need to be more concerned about the students learning how to make sense of the texts they are reading because the increase in standardized testing in these grades forces them to use these strategies. When educators discuss literacy, they are not talking about sounding out words, writing what they hear, or being able to say every word in a text. Being literate requires the student to make sense of what he or she is reading and apply it to something they already know, adding to a schema or creating a new one.
Content area literacy is more difficult to define in the elementary grades because we, as teachers, are teaching every content area. This only makes it so much more important that we are literate in each content area because we are quickly going to expect our students to be literate. Reading the words on a page is not enough to understand the text. Being literate means making meaningful connections to the text and applying it to something else in the students’ world. Without these connections, the information is useless to students.
Background knowledge plays an important part in understanding text, so teachers need to show students how to connect that to new information they take in. On a similar note, the students need to be assisted in every content area in order for them to eventually become independent and comfortable with informational text. Especially in the elementary grades, students need to start out with the hand-holding stage where the teacher meets them where they are developmentally and guides them through thinking processes until they are able to do this on their own.