Literacy

Course Description

At Cove, we provide a comprehensive literacy program that includes phonemic awareness, sight word instruction, word study (spelling, decoding, syllabication, word origins, and vocabulary), fluency, and comprehension. Multi-sensory instruction and strategy building are incorporated in all literacy programs. Each student's literacy program is unique to match his or her learning needs. We will be using the following curriculum in our class:

Reading

Leveled Literacy Intervention (Teal)

Leveled Literacy Intervention is a reading comprehension program that focuses on explicit teaching of strategies good readers use during reading to comprehend the material. The skills we will focus on include:

  • Comprehension skills

  • Vocabulary development

  • Spelling

Comprehensive Orton-Gillingham

All Cove Literacy teachers and Speech and Language Pathologists participated in a 30 hour Orton-Gillingham Training this summer. This program is what our school was founded on. It is a multi-sensory approach that includes sight, hearing, touch, and movement. It is highly structured and teaches the connection between sounds and letters. Many reading programs are influenced by the Orton-Gillingham approach. Some examples include the Wilson Reading System and SLANT. Even though the sequence of concepts may vary, these programs are all highly structured, systematic and cumulative.

Novel Studies

Students will have multiple opportunities to read different novels as a class. These novels will give the students the opportunity to apply strategies learned in LLI, along with other comprehension strategies. Students will be exposed to a variety of writing styles through the different genres we will be reading. They will also identify a variety of literary elements throughout their readings. The current novel we are reading is Things Not Seen by Andrew Clements.

Writing

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD)

Our literacy class will be using the Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) approach to writing. It is an instructional approach designed to help students learn, use, and adopt the strategies used by skilled writers; one that adds the element of self-regulation to strategy instruction for writing. As with other types of strategy instruction, SRSD is explicit, direct, and guided so that strategies become integrated into the overall learning process. Instruction begins as teacher-directed but with a goal of empowering students to be self-directed. The self-regulation element addresses negative self-talk or perceptions of self-as-learner through replacement with positive self-talk, self-instructions, and new habits with which to approach learning tasks.