This curriculum is a literature-based language arts program that, by focusing on writing, increases reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. This program is research-based, was refined over a two-year period of piloting it in a third-grade public school classroom in upstate New York, and meets national and state standards.
Over 20 years ago, third-graders in a public school, including those with special learning needs attributed to ADHD, ASD, learning disabilities, and giftedness, completed all of the assignments in this curriculum (with the exception of Unit 9). Examples of their handwritten work are included as evidence of how children as young as third-graders can think and write at this level of complexity. In 2024, I noticed that many sixth-graders did not know how to write at this level. Rather than ask if this curriculum is too rigorous for children in grades 3-5, a better question may be to ask why third-graders could write at this level 20 years ago, but many sixth-graders are struggling to do so now. Just as this curriculum worked 20 years ago with third-graders, I believe it can work today with students in grades 3-5.
The keys to this curriculum include:
- Develops critical thinking skills needed for reading comprehension and being able to communicate that comprehension through writing.
- Empowers students to become thoughtful, independent readers and writers by allowing them to master the skills that can be transferred and applied to other reading and writing tasks (rather than being dependent on the curriculum or the teacher for instructions about what to think and what to do). Consider the following eight ways in which this curriculum is empowering:
- Empowering Method #1: Adaptability. Rather than train the student to depend on the curriculum or teacher for providing the graphic organizer, this curriculum primarily focuses on only two graphic organizers which students learn how to use for a variety of purposes. This teaches them to see a graphic organizer as a versatile tool that can be adapted. Being able to adapt a tool or resource to meet a variety of needs is a great life skill!
- Empowering Method #2: Logical Reasoning. Rather than train the student to depend on the curriculum or teacher for providing the questions, the student learns what the questions are! Students can’t think of an answer if they don’t know the question, but if they know all the questions that need answering, they are free to develop the critical thinking skills needed for answering them! In this way, students learn how to think rather than what to think.
- Empowering Method #3: Visual (Keys for Color-Coding). This curriculum is highly visual which makes the brain happy! The color-coding used throughout the curriculum helps the brain to organize, retain, and retrieve information. Combining the color-coding with the use of graphic organizers helps the brain to categorize information.
- Empowering Method #4: Simple Steps. This curriculum breaks complex tasks into a process of simple steps (a “recipe” to follow), and that process can be mastered through repetition (see Empowering Method #5).
- Empowering Method #5: Guided. Observation of Explicit Teaching (including the use of metacognitive strategies by the teacher…available on the provided videotaped lessons) à Imitation à Carefully-sequenced Repetition with a gradual hand-off of responsibility to the student (in line with the Optimal Learning Model, The Science of Reading, elements of Guided Reading, and Classical Education). Students are not expected to do a task on their own until they have gained understanding of, and guided experience with, the process several times.
- Empowering Method #6: Foundation. This curriculum starts simple to build a foundation, an understanding of the process, and knowledge of the language being used.
- Empowering Method #7: Reading-Writing Connection. This curriculum is literature-based which makes it engaging and connected to the real world. Being literature-based shows the connection between stories written by other authors (which can be read) and stories that can be written by the student. The Story Map can be used to backward-engineer the plan of a fictional story or non-fiction text they read, or to engineer the plan of a story, report, or essay they want to write.
- Empowering Method #8: Rubrics. Students learn how to use rubrics to assess their own writing. The rubric reinforces the expectation of how the writing will be organized and what information should be included. It empowers the student to analyze his/her own writing and see what was missed, what could be improved, and what has been mastered!
Empowerment –> Confidence –> Joy!
