Start learners’ literacy journey off right with a solid foundation. When students develop the phonemic awareness necessary to recognize, distinguish, and manipulate the sounds that make up words and the phonics necessary for recognizing and recreating printed words, the print world is opened to them. Through explicit instruction and carefully guided practice, students can not only make accelerated progress, but learn when and how to use the strategies teachers are modeling and sharing.

Learn and apply research-based instructional strategies to ensure all students:

• Develop, practice, and apply phonemic awareness
• Learn and use phonics to decode words as readers and encode words as authors
• Make the most of meaningful, engaging, decodable readers

Increase students’ understanding and enjoyment of anything and everything they read by focusing on fluency. Reading fluency is the combination of accuracy, rate, and prosody (the rhythm, stress, and intonation that bring words to life). This skill asks learners to apply the foundational skills they are developing and facilitates reading comprehension. Learn to use explicit instruction and proven strategies for learning, practicing, and monitoring, this bridge between word recognition and language comprehension.

Learn and apply research-based instructional strategies to ensure all students:

• Receive explicit instruction supporting the development of accuracy, rate, and prosody necessary for reading comprehension
• Develop strategies for self-monitoring, problem-solving, and correcting errors to increase accuracy
• Engage in authentic, deliberate practice working toward personalized goals

Knowledge building and vocabulary acquisition are foundational pillars of effective learning and literacy development. Vocabulary acquisition not only facilitates comprehension but also empowers learners to engage more deeply with complex texts and concepts. By continually building knowledge and expanding vocabulary, students enhance their cognitive abilities, critical thinking skills, and overall academic and professional success through morphology or making meaning of words using context clues.

Learn and apply research-based instructional strategies to:

• Develop techniques to actively engage students in vocabulary acquisition 
• Facilitate the integration of vocabulary acquisition approaches and knowledge building into daily instruction

The ultimate goal of reading is to understand and engage with texts. Learn to provide direct, explicit instruction that empowers students to make sense of, analyze, interpret, and even enjoy texts. Learn to provide direct, explicit instruction to empower students to solve, learn, and understand new vocabulary, to make connections to texts, including their prior knowledge and experiences, and to think critically and analytically about explicit and inferential information.

Learn and apply research-based instructional strategies to ensure all students:

• Self-monitor comprehension via self regulation when meaning breaks down 
• Actively make connections with, between, and to texts, including with their prior knowledge and experiences
• Apply strategies that promote active knowledge building for all levels of rigor (surface, deep, and transfer) 
• Develop strategies to think critically and analytically about explicit and inferential information in any text

Students need direct, explicit instruction and opportunities for deliberate practice, feedback and revision.. Our writing approach focuses on teaching students the foundational skills of writing through sentence-level activities, such as sentence expansion and combining, before progressing to more complex tasks like paragraph and essay writing. We connect writing directly with reading so that students can think critically about texts, apply and transfer the vocabulary and concepts they are learning, deepen content knowledge, understand author’s craft, and emulate the writing experts they see as mentors.

Learn and apply research-based instructional strategies to ensure all students:

• Have the foundational skills they need to write clearly, fluently, and independently to communicate ideas effectively 
• Can apply the writing process to generate, organize, clarify, and refine their own thinking and their understanding of what they are learning

Honor the cultures of our multilingual (ML) learners to accelerate their progress and growth using evidence based practice anchored in culturally responsive-sustaining practices.

• Understand how humans acquire language
• Identify language acquisition levels
• Assessing and giving feedback to ML learners
• Engaging families of ML learners
• Making content comprehensible