ELA Curriculum

This year we are excited to be a pilot school for Teach Like a Champion's Reading Reconsidered Curriculum. Reading Reconsidered focuses on knowledge building, Intensive writing and is Novel Centric.

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING

Research tells us that background knowledge is at least as important to reading comprehension as reading “skills.” Knowledge—of history, science, literary terms, vocabulary—is the chicken and the egg. Knowledge is the outcome of successful reading as well as the wellspring that feeds it.

Our approach to building and reinforcing knowledge is both text-specific and long-term. From a text-specific perspective, we infuse our lessons with directly useful knowledge to increase how much students understand of and learn from that particular text. From a long-term perspective, we seek to build a strong base of knowledge that increases student understanding of important ideas and concepts that they are likely to encounter in the future, and we provide cognitive research-based ways of encoding that knowledge into long term memory.

WRITING INTENSIVE

Writing is among the most important thinking work that students can do. It’s also among the most challenging tasks for students, and one of the hardest to teach. We think strong lessons should make sure that students learn to write as a way to develop and refine their understanding of text. Our curriculum asks students to write—constantly—in three different ways:

Developmental writing consists of exercises, embedded in the content of the reading, that seek to develop students’ syntactic control by focusing on craft at the sentence level.
Formative writing consists of exercises that let students use writing as a tool to develop and expand their thinking—to “think in writing.”
Summative writing asks students to form and develop paragraphs that explain and provide evidence for a more developed argument about the text.

NOVEL CENTRIC

Our units seek to put the text—and often reading the text with classmates—at the center of the lesson. One of the first things you’ll notice about our curriculum is that lesson objectives are text-driven: they describe what we want students to understand about the passage of text they are reading that day. Most likely you will never see the same lesson objective twice. They’re unique to each lesson because they are specific to the passage or text.

We ask students to engage with text in three different ways: Accountable Independent Reading (silent, autonomous reading), Control the Game (shared read-aloud between students and teachers), and Read Aloud (teachers reading texts out loud). These last two forms of reading are especially important to us and represent a departure from many curriculums. Reading, we believe, competes with other forms of media for students’ attention and interest. Using social oral reading is a powerful way to build a culture of pleasure not only in texts but also in the act of reading. Students hearing their teacher and peers read out loud with joy and expression connects them to the idea that the book is relevant, worthwhile, and joyful.

7th Grade Novels:

Novels used with Reading Reconsidered:

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
I Am Malala: Young Reader’s Edition by Malala Yousafzai
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Narrative Short Story Unit

Additional Novels/Units:

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of an Immigrant Child by Francisco Jimenez
Career Cruising Unit - Students will explore future Careers
Poetry Unit including Love that Dog