Reading Curriculum: Find and Leverage the Patterns

 

   

For those of us teaching elementary school, and adopting or leveraging new literacy curriculums, it is messy, it is hard, and it is rewarding.  Did I say messy? There is just so much of it and there are so many decisions to make. At first I really struggled to see any meaningful patterns in the spiral lessons.  The curriculum of choice at my school is HMH Into Reading v3, there are loads of materials and navigating them all can be a trial at the start.  It feels overwhelming to sift through it all, even with the weekly editable plans.  Thank goodness last summer a pattern was pointed out to us at a PD!  We were advised that one way to leverage this curriculum is to go to lesson 15, any module, and look for the "Performance Task" as an alternative to the "Wrap Up" activities.  That was one of the most helpful PD's I participated in concerning the new curriculum to that point.  Simply having someone point out a pattern for planning that I could recreate in each Module was a huge bonus! 

    The performance task is a writing prompt in line with the yellow "Building Knowledge" sticky notes in the TeachingPal v3, and it has truly helped me focus my instruction this year.  It is a path you can use to facilitate and build understanding throughout the Module and not only prepare students for the performance task, but start to really feel like the essential question lives and breathes through each module.  

    At first though, it felt disjointed because it felt like choosing lessons to support the end goal was like picking needles out of a haystack and that many lessons didn't feel helpful.  Then slowly, as I dove into each module this year, I discovered more pattern, which provided me more purpose, in those middle module lessons.  Lessons 7/8 or 8/9, depending on the module, cover some key elements and offer a place for students to try some of the skills "with teacher support" before asking them to complete the performance task the following week.  Those are the ones I aim for..  

    For instance in Module 8, I chose the MyBook activity, "Write Dos and Don'ts for How to Make Friends with a Giant." as a response to reading The Jack and Jackie stories.   I took advantage of the Fact that some previous lessons focused on Text Features, and I carried that forward into a slightly modified version of the MyBook assignment, by encouraging the kids to create a poster about How to Make Friends with a Giant, and include both Dos and Don'ts and text features to make their poster stand out. I hope I facilitated more connections for the kids.  This week the kids are planning a booklet on how to grow a healthy plant, and I was able to call on that previous experience and encourage them to again, think about text features to help teach the steps to their reader.  I walked kids over to the posters to remind them, "This is what we mean when we say include text features in your booklet."

    New curriculum can be overwhelming with its abundance of materials and choices.  Some teachers are trying to "do it all".  My suggestion is to look for patterns and connections and choose the lessons that work together toward the goal you are teaching.  This curriculum like many out there now was designed to offer many opportunities and options for learning.  I find the more I start with small patterns and build up the more I am able to leverage the curriculum to teach.