Reading and Social Studies: How To Support Struggling Readers

Social studies classrooms are unique spaces where historical narratives meet current events. They open up exciting learning opportunities where students can learn how we got to where we are now by contextualizing events, corroborating evidence, exploring causality, and developing historical thinking skills. But these skills don’t exist in a special social studies vacuum. They’re grounded in literacy.

Reading scores have declined each year since 2020. If students are struggling to read, they’re likely also struggling in subjects like social studies, where reading is a key component for encountering and internalizing knowledge. But here’s some good news: We can teach reading and social studies together to help students access grade-level content and give them the support they need to read on grade level. 

Social studies materials can support all students, regardless of reading level, in the classroom when you:

• Build background knowledge with multimedia primary sources

• Scaffold resources to make reading more accessible

• Design lessons that encourage inquiry

Build background knowledge with multimedia primary sources

Have you ever picked up an old photograph and wondered, “What was happening here?” If you think about who took the picture or the events that took place before or after, you’re engaging in mini inquiries. They’re helping you contextualize the image. This is how you want students to approach sources in social studies and build background knowledge.

Multimedia primary sources—like photos, political cartoons, maps, and videos—help engage struggling readers in the content and allow them to build background knowledge without reading a word of text. They support students by providing context and pre-text exposure to academic vocabulary that you use in discussions about the visuals.

Newsela Social Studies has an extensive library of multimedia primary sources (like those linked above!) to help kick-start conversations on grade-level topics. You can also use these resources as a primer before introducing complex written content, like text-based primary sources. You can assign all primary source documents on Newsela Social Studies at five reading levels. 

Scaffold resources to make reading more accessible

Once you’ve helped students build background knowledge on the lesson topic, it’s time to introduce some texts. Differentiated materials can be a game changer to help you provide accessible content for all your students—regardless of their reading level—so they can learn the same content knowledge with adapted resources. 

For below-grade-level readers, rolling text sets help you provide a road map for their growth. You can support these students as they build background knowledge and develop their reading skills as they gradually transition from one text to the next.

Rolling text sets include content around one theme. This helps students build background knowledge around the topic to understand its nuance and details. Each piece of content within the set increases in complexity and word count. Students can start with the lowest level text and start to build content knowledge, then progress through all the texts to the most complex one to build literacy skills along the way.

Newsela Social Studies is the perfect tool for building a rolling text set around any social studies topic you teach. Choose articles from our vast content library—with over 15,000+ texts across Newsela’s knowledge and skill-building products —or use one of the pre-made text sets designed by our curriculum team or other teachers.

You can access all informational and news articles within our text sets at five reading levels so students can read any text inside—not just one piece—and a lower or higher reading level as their skills progress. Additional scaffolding tools like read aloud mode, checks for understanding, and Spanish language articles help you differentiate content and scaffold lessons to further support struggling readers in social studies.

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Design lessons that encourage inquiry

The core of inquiry-based instruction is students asking questions and seeking out more information. Inquiry gives students the autonomy and space to explore content, helping them construct meaning from texts, multimedia resources, and the world around them.

Creating lessons around a compelling question and then providing engaging resources help you leverage students’ natural curiosity and draw them into what you’re teaching. The most compelling questions are intellectually rigorous but also student-friendly. They open the door for examination and encourage students to look at a topic from a broader, more open-ended lens. Some sample compelling questions include:

• What does it mean to be equal?

• Does it matter how we select our leaders?

• Can ideological wars be more dangerous than physical ones?

Asking a compelling question gives students a reason to explore the resources you provide. It’s not because you told them to or because they need to get a good grade, but because they want to find out the answer. 

You might worry that your struggling readers can’t access inquiry-based lessons and resources because they’re too complex. But when you ask the right questions and provide appropriately scaffolded materials, this isn’t an issue. In fact, for struggling readers, an inquiry question can actually provide the hook they need to get interested in a topic and put in the internal work they need to access the content with your external support.

Newsela Social Studies has curated inquiry-based learning collections on topics like civics and U.S. History. You can also choose ones just right for your grade band, with collections appropriate for elementary and high school students. Each text in a collection still has those necessary differentiation supports to allow you to adjust reading levels, assign formative assessments, and create engaging activities that give students the tools they need to investigate and answer each question.

See what Newsela Social Studies can do for you

When you scaffold lessons and content effectively, the social studies classroom becomes another place where you can support below-grade-level readers and help them grow content knowledge and literacy skills together. When they build background knowledge and increase their academic vocabulary, it supports their ability to engage with texts across the curriculum and beyond the classroom.

Newsela Social Studies helps all students access grade-level social studies concepts with diverse, relevant, and timely stories and past-to-present connections. In fact, students who use Newsela Social Studies weekly have seen the equivalent of an additional year of instruction on their state social studies exams.

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