Balanced LiteracyOur literacy program is designed to meet the components of balanced literacy which means two things: we devote time to all of the literacy components--reading, writing, speaking, and listening with explicit attention to comprehension, phonics, and vocabulary skills and strategies. We also balance it to make sure students are working with texts at their independent reading level, their instructional reading level, and their grade level.
Phonics & VocabularyConsistent with the standards and best practices in literacy instruction, the work we do in both phonics and vocabulary is text dependent. Therefore, your child will not have weekly spelling and vocabulary lists similar to the ones you may recall receiving when you were a student.
Assessments & QuizzesTo help your child master the standards by the end of the year, we will monitor their work by using both weekly and end of unit assessments. The weekly assessments are used to inform my teaching and will focus on the material taught that week. Weekly assessments will not be graded. The Unit assessments are comprehensive and will be graded. They include reading comprehension, phonics, vocabulary, and written responses to text dependent questions.
Each unit is approximately 3 weeks long, with each week comprised of 6 days (Day 1-5 are instructional, and Day 6 serves as an assessment day). We take our graded unit assessment at the end of week 3. Along with their weekly assessments, students will also have 2 graded grammar & phonics quizzes per unit (one for the skills learned during week 1 and another for the skills learned during week 2). |
Spiral LearningThe skills and strategies that are taught each unit to help students tackle these challenging texts spiral - they are revisited multiple times throughout the school year. This means that not all students will master each skill the first time around, and that is not only okay, but expected! Students will receive repeated exposure and guided practice so that they can achieve mastery by the end of the fourth grade year.
Close Reading & WritingStudents will utilize the close reading protocol (reading, annotating, re-reading, and responding) to interact with challenging texts each week. This process helps students to comprehend the texts they read on a much deeper level. It is important that students work through the entire process, rather than simply reading the text once. Writing projects will relate to their reading and require students to integrate and cite information from the texts we have read in class. Students will notice that the more they re-read and annotate their texts, the easier their writing projects will become.
Website Link: www.holmdel.benchmarkuniverse.com
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