K-12 Reading Vision and Philosophy

We believe that all students are readers, and we will foster an appreciation of reading as an essential life skill and communication tool.

Philosophy

We recognize:

• Literacy is a lifelong developmental process with students progressing at various rates
• Students come to school with a wide range of literacy experiences

We believe:

• Reading is a life-long skill that affects all aspects of a person’s life
• Reading is the foundation for all content areas
• It is a shared responsibility to build strong readers
• Reading is an essential tool to participate fully in the social life of family, community and global world
• The ultimate goal is for students to construct meaning from print and develop a love of reading

We provide:

• Balanced reading instruction that is systematic, explicit, and sequential
• Instruction in the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension)
• A strong school to home connection
• A stimulating learning environment and instruction that is designed to meet the individual’s needs, interests and strengths in all content areas
• Opportunities for students to critically interact with a variety of text in all content areas

K-12 Reading Materials

Our Colorado State Standards along with our Essential Skills make up our “reading program”.  Published materials are tools that help us teach the curriculum, but are not our “curriculum”.

Elementary K-5

• Our elementary reading task force wanted some consistency across the district and especially in each building with regard to common language and processes to help students build their skills and concepts from year to year.  They recognized that no one “program” teaches it all, so while they wanted consistency, they also wanted teachers to have some flexibility to apply best practices and coordinate reading from content areas.  With the understanding that our K-12 Reading/Writing alignment is our “curriculum”, the materials adoption are the tools that help us achieve those grade level expectations.  Grade levels work collaboratively to identify grade level checklists or assessments and determine proficiency levels based on those documents which give the district the same targets.

• Macmillan McGraw Hill (Treasures) with Triumphs and Treasure Chest for Interventions

• Buildings had the choice to adopt the full program or one set per grade level with some dollars set aside to purchase content area books and stipends for teams to design integrated and differentiated units
• All buildings are held to common grade level benchmark essential skills and concepts
• Writing Alive Hand-in-Hand is used to tie the writing instruction to the reading

• Project Read Phonology

• Phonology will be used as a consistent phonology/linguistic program in conjunction with spelling to provide an explicit and systematic approach  from early phonics through multisyllabic words, roots & affixes

Middle School:  McDougal Little Literature Series (grades 6 – 8)

High School: Prentice Hall Literature Series (English I, II, III, IV)

WPSD K-12 Reading Curriculum