Embedded Files
These translated guides support caregivers in understanding what students are expected to know and be able to do by the end of each grade.
We value your thoughts and are here to answer your questions! Please feel free to reach out to your child's teacher, school-based literacy coach, or the ELA Department as needed.
CPP (Preschool) Curriculum Overview
Early childhood classrooms throughout CPS use the Focus on 4s (CPP) and Focus on K (Kindergarten) curriculum. Focus curricula incorporate educational principles that enhance the overall growth and autonomy of young learners, integrating research-backed instructional methodologies while aligning to the Massachusetts and Common Core Curriculum Frameworks.
Focus activities are designed to nurture students' emerging independence as both learners and responsible members of society, fostering connection, communication and collaboration skills. The framework was crafted to ensure synergy among its components, promoting students' proficiency in literacy and language, science and engineering, social studies, the arts, and social-emotional development. Literary and informational texts take center stage in each unit, serving as catalysts for conceptual learning, vocabulary enrichment, and the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Each unit incorporates dedicated Writing, in addition to integrating Social Studies and Science standards that are complemented by the CPS Science and S.S. units.
In addition, all early childhood classrooms participate in explicit, daily, research-based phonemic awareness and phonics instruction using the Heggerty (Phonemic Awareness) and Fundations or TLA Phonics curricula. ensuring their proficiency of foundational literacy skills.
We encourage caregivers to visit the CPSD Early Childhood Website -> Here!
Assessments:
All CPP students complete early literacy screeners/diagnostics 2-3x annually. These screeners provide educators and caregivers with important information about each students’ strengths and areas for continued support.
Learn more about grade-specific assessments here.
Homework:
Homework is not assigned in CPP classrooms, however, activities may be sent home by classroom teachers based on the needs of specific students. These may include additional readings from the curriculum, opportunities to continue working on a written response, or extended practice with specific skills.
Intervention & Acceleration Opportunities:
Using multiple forms of student data, educators design learning experiences that provide each student with appropriately challenging learning opportunities. This includes opportunities for acceleration/advancement and intervention/remediation from classroom teachers and/or interventionists. Educators routinely reflect on student learning and assessment data to differentiate instruction for their students.
Learn more about literacy intervention here.
Focus on 4s: Units of Instruction
Focus on 4s: Units of Instruction
Unit 1: Together in Our Community
The primary goal for the first unit of study, Together in Our Community, is for children and teachers to build the foundation for a strong community of learners—developing caring and respectful relationships and routines and expectations for how the classroom works. From the very first day of school, children and adults share experiences with stories and in play, exploring what it means to be in school, feelings, identity and family, and community. They develop shared ways of interacting, solving problems, and doing and making things. They begin a year-long study of weather. The eight-week unit closes with a Showcase of Learning for families and other community members, displaying children’s self-portraits and celebrating their launch to the school year.
Books we’ll be reading in Unit 1:
Lola Goes to School by Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw
Too Many Mangos: a story about sharing by Tammy Paikai
What Riley Wore by Elana K. Arnold
Sometimes I’m Bombaloo by Rachel Vail and Yumi Heo
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld
Saturday by Oge Mora
Everybody in the Red Brick Building by Anne Wynter and Oge Mora
My Day with Gong Gong by Sennah Yee and Elaine Chen
Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn by Kenard Pak
Alma and How She Got Her Name by Juana Martinez-Neal
Hair Love by Matthew Cherry and Vashti Harrison
Frederick by Leo Lionni
Unit 2: Building Our Working City
As children look around the city where they live, as they listen to the sounds it makes and see the people who populate it, they might begin to wonder what makes the city function. Who does what? What purpose does this serve? Why is it organized or built that way? What else can we imagine? In the this unit of study children and adults build on the community they have formed and the systems they have routinized in Unit 1 to learn together about some of the structures, features, and people that make things happen in the city around us. In the last two weeks of the unit, children create a model of a city street—including elements and features of a working city: transportation, communication, and infrastructure systems, construction, public art, and people’s roles.
Books we’ll be reading in Unit 2:
My City by Joanne Liu
Daniel’s Good Day by Micha Archer
Quinito’s Neighborhood / El vecindario de Quinito by Ina Cumpiano and José Ramírez
The Lost Package by Richard Ho and Jessica Lanan
City Shapes by Diana Murray and Bryan Collier
Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler and Loren Long
Dream Street by Tricia Elam Walker and Ekua Holmes
Tap Tap Boom Boom by Elizabeth Bluemle and G. Brian Karas
Song in the City by Daniel Bernstrom and Jenin Mohammed
Dreaming Up by Christy Hale
I’ll Be an Engineer by Connie Colwell Miller and Silvia Baroncelli
Maybe Something Beautiful by Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell
Unit 3: Animals All Around
Children tend to be fascinated by animals. In this unit, children notice and learn about animals in the immediate, urban environment, those that live outside the city but still close by (in Massachusetts), and those that live in the ocean. They also make direct connections between themselves and other animals. Throughout, children entertain questions about how animals live in their environments: Why and how do animals communicate? What body parts do different animals have, and how do they use those parts to help them live? How do animals move? How do we move? We also continue the year-long thread about weather, by considering how animals respond to varying weather and seasonal conditions. Towards the end of the unit, children’s knowledge about animals is incorporated into a class play!
Books we’ll be reading in Unit 3:
Squirrels Leap, Squirrels Sleep by April Pulley Sayre and Steve Jenkins
Nuts! by Lou Peacock and Yasmeen Ismail
Have You Heard the Nesting Bird? by Rita Gray and Kenard Pak
Over in the Forest by Marianne Berkes and Jill Dubin
May I Come In? by Marsha Diane Arnold and Jennie Poh
The Mitten (We will read our own version of this folktale, but you can find books by Alvin Tressalt, Jan Brett, Jim Aylesworth, and others)
Shh! Bears Sleeping by David Martin, Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson
The Lion and the Little Red Bird by Elisa Kleven
Move! by April Pulley Sayre and Steve Jenkins
Over and Under the Waves by Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal
Noah’s Seal by Layn Marlow
We All Play/kimêtawânaw by Julie Flett
Bedtime for Sweet Creatures by Nikki Grimes and Elizabeth Zunon
Unit 4: Growing and Changing
All year long, children have been changing, and they will continue to do so as they move into the summer and perhaps a new school environment in September. This final unit, Growing and Changing, celebrates the multiple dimensions of children’s growth and encourages them to notice, wonder about, and represent other living things as they also change and grow. Children start plants and observe butterflies as they change from caterpillars to adults, recording what they notice. How does a seed become a plant? How does a baby become an adult? What changes can we observe? What impacts the growth and health of living things? To close the unit and the school year, children set up a Growing Gallery, sharing how they have grown and changed and their ideas about that, and sharing their work across the unit as their understanding about living things has grown and they look across their experience together and toward what comes next.
Books we’ll be reading in Unit 4:
Eco Girl by Ken Max-Wilson
A Seed Grows by Antoinette Portis
Planting Seeds by Kathryn Clay
The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin
Seed to Plant (National Geographic Kids) by Kristin Baird Rattini
The Gigantic Turnip by Aleksei Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey
Caterpillar and Bean by Martin Jenkins and Hannah Tolson
Animals Here We Grow! by Shelley Rotner
Rooftop Garden by Danna Smith and Pati Aguilera (with a song by Holly Turton)
Waiting for Wings by Lois Ehlert
Because of an Acorn by Lola M. Schaefer, Adam Schaefer, and Frann Preston-Gannon
Love Makes a Garden Grow by Taeeun Yoo
Farfallina and Marcel by Holly Keller
Everybody Has a Body by Molli Jackson Ehlert and Lorian Tu
I’m Not Small by Nina Crews
Red Shoes by Karen English and Ebony Glenn
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