CENTERBURG – Centerburg’s literacy team presented its recommendation for literacy curriculum changes at the elementary level — a combination of the two curricula it began piloting this school year at Monday night’s board meeting.
For kindergarten through second grade, Core Knowledge Language Arts from Amplify is the recommendation.
“The reason we chose (CKLA) is really it’s much more developmentally appropriate for grades K-2 as they’re learning the phonics skills,” Centerburg’s director of teaching and learning Barb Gentille Green said Monday. “It’s very laid out. It’s very specific. It’s explicit instruction.”
For third through fifth grade, the team suggests Into Reading from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Into Reading also has explicit phonics instruction but has writing instruction materials and support more suitable for the needs in upper grades, elementary principal Miguel Thompson said of the literacy team’s reasoning.
“It had better graphic organizers and ways to organize writing than CKLA,” Thompson said.
The literacy team comprises Gentille Green, Thompson, general education teachers, a speech language pathologist, two title reading teachers and two intervention specialists.
The board did not vote on the team’s recommendation during Monday’s meeting but intends to at the regular April meeting, following two public review meetings where parents and community members can learn about the curricula from 1 to 2:30 p.m. March 25 and from 4 to 5:30 p.m. April 6.
“No curriculum is going to be perfect,” Gentille Green said when presenting the recommendation, which is why the literacy team has also recommended supplemental components for each curricula.
CKLA at kindergarten through second grade level would be supplemented by Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum, which the district is already using as a supplement, as well as support for writing development. The specific writing supplement program has yet to be determined, Gentille Green said.
Into Reading for third through fifth grade would be supplemented with knowledge building reading materials to address listening and speaking standards. These specific supplemental materials have also not yet been determined, Gentille Green said.
Both CKLA and Into Reading teach reading based on the simple view of reading:
Word recognition (decoding) x language comprehension = reading comprehension
The supplements are intended to fill in gaps in both components, as reading comprehension is not a skill in and of itself but a product of decoding and language comprehension, Gentille Green said.
Centerburg began piloting the new literacy curricula at the start of the 2021-22 school year, with a teacher per grade piloting CKLA and another piloting Into Reading, with the exception of fifth grade, because there is only one language arts teacher.
Throughout the month of February, teachers completed a rubric evaluating their respective pilot curriculum and met with Gentille Green and the elementary principal, Thompson, to review the rubric and answer additional questions ahead of the recommendation Monday.
For more information about the two curricula, see: Learning to read: Centerburg making shift from cueing to phonics
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