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Introduction
Families and Guardians Are Partners
EL Education’s curriculum welcomes students’ families and guardians as partners in education. Students learn best when families have the opportunity to be part of the educational journey. The curriculum includes sample letters teachers can send home that describe what students will learn during a given module, how guardians can support that learning, and specific homework assignments. Students are encouraged to share what they are learning with their family and, sometimes, to interview family members about their expertise and experiences.
Curriculum as Powerful Professional Development
This curriculum helps teachers build on their existing expertise and continue to improve their ability to make strong instructional decisions during planning and while teaching. Teachers are provided rich resources and opportunities to make sound and specific instructional decisions based on their students’ needs.
How Does EL Education’s Curriculum Address College and Career Standards for Literacy?
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. In fact, remarkably, research shows that she is even more able to successfully read about and understand new content.*
[V.DESIGN: INSERT READING, THINKING, TALKING, WRITING ABOUT WORTHY TEXT IMAGE HERE]
When we talk about daily lessons, we often use the organizing principle of the read-think- talk-write cycle, which gives students an opportunity to synthesize evidence, play with ideas, develop arguments, and practice various forms of communication during lessons (or sequences of lessons). EL Education’s Grade 6–8 Language Arts curriculum has been created with substantive content understanding—science and social studies—at its heart. Students deepen their understanding of that content, and they simultaneously acquire all the key literacy skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language required by the standards, which are carefully embedded within the content. The following tables show how the Read-Think-Talk-Write Framework in EL Education’s curriculum aligns with aspects of the standards.
*Recht, D.R., & Leslie, L. (1988). “E ect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20.
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