Literacy

At HKIS, we believe literacy – reading, writing, speaking, and listening, is a keystone to all learning. We value questions as much as answers, process as much as product, and connections as much as content. Literacy is a transdisciplinary skill that enables us to reflect, transform and innovate to better understand the world around us.

Our Upper Primary literacy-curriculum is based on research-based best practices from the United States. Resources and research that inform literacy teaching and learning include literacy workshop practices and Marzano’s Critical Concepts, as our adopted standards. These standards ensure consistency across grades and divisions, and provide a challenging and developmentally appropriate curriculum for our students.

Marzano’s Critical Concepts focus on bundling like concepts together and prioritizing critical areas for student focus. Below are the Reporting Categories and Measurement Topics that are included within the Upper Primary curriculum:

Over the last several years, teachers and our curriculum team have come together across divisions to construct transfer goals that highlight the effective uses of understanding, knowledge, and skills that we hope students will be able to apply in the future when confronted with new challenges – both inside and outside of school (McTighe 2014).

R1 – 12 ELA Disciplinary Transfer Goals

HKIS graduates will independently use their learning in ELA to:

• Communicate clearly and strategically for a variety of audiences, settings and purposes.
• Engage with challenging and diverse forms of text, and grapple with complex perspectives across time and space.
• Construct logical, robust and informed arguments, assess the validity of their own thinking, and consider the merits of others’ arguments.

R1 - 12 ELA Common Agreements

We agree that English Language Arts education happens best when we provide opportunities for students to:

• Work in a climate of trust that encourages risk taking and in which they feel safe and valued.
• Be self-motivated and take ownership of their learning.
• Experience and engage with multiple voices and perspectives.
• Explore literature and language collaboratively.

HKIS Upper Primary Literacy Instruction

Reading and writing workshops are the primary structures in which Upper Primary students do most of their learning and work as readers and writers. With a predictable structure, ample time for students to ead and write, and a combination of whole class, small group, and individual instruction, workshops allow teachers to differentiate to meet the needs of all students.

Reading Workshop

The Reading Workshop, most importantly, gives students time to read, while practicing the decoding strategies, comprehension strategies, reading behaviors, and talking and thinking strategies that are taught through reading mini-lessons. Students are continually challenged to grow and support new ideas about texts and to provide evidence for their thinking.

Teachers support students in choosing books for independent reading from the classroom and school libraries. Students are encouraged to choose a balance of literary and informational texts. Students learn to know themselves as readers, set reading goals, take risks and challenge themselves to read books from a variety of genres. An important part of the reading workshop is one-on-one conferencing and small group work between teacher and students based on the student’s current reading.

Read Aloud

Teachers read a carefully chosen book aloud to the whole class, considering diversity and genre. As teachers read, they stop to model their thinking as readers for students. Teachers encourage students to reflect on language, vocabulary, character traits and choices, and important details. They push students to make connections to real life, other texts, and themselves. Class discussions about read aloud texts scaffold students’ further meaningful independent talk about books.

Shared Reading

Shared reading is often explained as “all eyes on one text”. In the Upper Primary, that may be an enlarged text so that all children can see, or a copy of a paper or digital text. The teacher involves children in reading together to build upon their fluency and comprehension.

Strategy Groups

Teachers work with small groups who are working towards the same reading goals/needs. This is a time when teachers provide explicit instruction to meet the needs of students learning various strategies to support their language, decoding and comprehension skills.

Writing Workshop

The writing process sits at the heart of the writing workshop. Students compose and draft their own pieces in three writing genres: informational, opinion, and narrative. Students follow an authentic writing process that leads them through planning, drafting, revision, editing, and publication.

Professional and student examples of the kinds of texts students are asked to write are provided as “mentor texts”. They encourage students to read as writers, noticing the qualities of certain kinds of writing that make it successful. Teachers model their own work as writers. An important part of the workshop is one-on-one conferencing and small group work between teacher and students based on the student’s current writing work.

Interactive Writing

Teachers and students work together to plan and compose pieces of writing which allow them to practice the writing process together.

Strategy Groups

Teachers work with small groups towards the same reading goals/needs. This is a time when teachers provide explicit instruction to meet the needs of students learning various strategies to support their language, decoding and comprehension skills.

Word Study

Teachers provide opportunities for students to recognize, learn, and apply patterns in words and language. Students develop an understanding of how words work. Teachers teach through the lens of morphology and etymology, making inquiries into how words are broken into parts and the history of where words come from. In this way, students can deepen their understanding of not only spelling but meaning as well. Spelling and grammar competency is further fostered through students’ carefully editing their own writing work.