For Parents
Our Pk-8 literacy curriculum is built around three core programs, Fundations and EL-Language Arts. All of these programs are considered high-quality. We are working to ensure that our teachers have the highest quality materials to teach with and the expertise to teach well. Our guiding beliefs about teaching students literacy are grounded in the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling. We are committed to implementing programs and interventions supported by scientific research. If you are interested in learning more about the science of reading, Scarborough’s Reading Rope and Emily Hanford’s Reporting are two great places to start.
Literacy Activities for Caregivers – This link will take you to mClass Home Connect. You will find activities you can do at home to help your child learn to read.
Creative Curriculum
Creative Curriculum is a top rated play-based curriculum focused on developing social and emotional, physical, and academic skills.
Fundations
Fundations® is a multisensory and systematic phonics, spelling, and handwriting program that benefits all K-3 students.
Informed by an extensive research base and following principles of instruction demonstrating success for a wide variety of learners, that thoroughly teaches the foundational skills, and significantly supports the reading, writing, and language standards.
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Fundations presents the following concepts and skills cumulatively from Unit to Unit and year to year:
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Letter Formation
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Phonological and phonemic awareness
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Sound mastery
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Phonics, word study, and advanced word study
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Irregular (trick) word instruction
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Vocabulary
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Fluency
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Comprehension strategies
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Written composition (spelling and handwriting)
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EL Education Language Arts
We adopted the EL-ELA program in the spring of 2022 and began implementation in August of 2022.
EL is a knowledge-based program. This means that the program is designed for students to dive deeply into a topic. They develop a deep understanding by reading, writing, and speaking extensively about a single topic.
The EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum is designed around eight principles:
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Equity & Inclusion: All children deserve a curriculum that fosters their unique abilities, honors their assets, gives them the opportunity to achieve high academic standards, and builds their capacity to shape the world around them.
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Embedded Social-Emotional Learning: Research shows that academic and social-emotional development are intertwined and mutually reinforcing, so our curriculum encourages students to develop as effective learners and ethical people.
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Knowledge-Rich, Substantive Content: Research shows that the deeper the content knowledge a student has, the more she is able to understand what she reads, and the more she is able to speak and write clearly about that content.
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Open Educational Resource (OER): All students and educators deserve access to high-quality educational resources, so the EL curriculum is open access, available for free, and adaptable by providers who are meeting diverse school needs.
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Students Own Their Learning. From the earliest grades, students learn to see themselves as active learners with agency in their education. With the teacher’s guidance, they articulate specific learning targets in every lesson, set goals, assess their learning, and use self-reflection and feedback from peers, themselves, and their teachers to make progress.
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Curriculum as Professional Development: The EL curriculum is written to help teachers envision and implement instructional routines that allow all types of learners to access the material. Both new and veteran teachers build on their existing expertise and strengthen instructional decision-making.
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The Science of Reading: Based on literacy research, our curriculum includes content-rich literature across the disciplines as well as a K-2 structured phonics program.
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Standards-based: EL is tailor-built to standards and receives quality reviews against acclaimed standards-alignment rubrics.
In the spring of 2023, our high school ELA teachers made the decision to adopt CommonLit for the 9th ELA course. CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially students in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond. Implementation of this program will begin in the fall of 2023 with the 9th-grade class. The topics addressed in the 9th-grade curriculum are:
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Following the Crowd
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People and the Environment
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Animal Farm
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The Science of Branding: Why We Buy
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Parents and Childeran
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Grafitti: Art or Crime
For Teachers
WSD Guiding Literacy Documents
Literacy Intervention Materials
At Winooski ,we use the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills as our universal screener k-8. If a student falls below the 40th percentile we use the Phonemic Awareness Screening Tool (PAST) and the Quick Phonics Screener (QPS) as diagnostics to develop a Six-Step Lesson plan as our primary intervention for foundational literacy skills.
Road to Reading Resource for Six-Step Lesson Planning
Six-Step Lesson Plans – This resource is restricted to Winooski Teachers
The Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network has excellent resources teaching reading. This link takes you to their video library.
The Reading League has a wealth of free and paid content. Dr. Maria Murray’s series on some of the critical elements of reading is required watching if you are going to understand why we approach reading the way we do at WSD.
Phoneme vs Phonological Awareness
Syllable Patterns and Division
This Structured Literacy Primer by Carolyn D. Cowen is a simple introduction to structured literacy.
The Barksdale Institute
