Curriculum Connections → Reading → Guide for Parents

Reading and Language Arts

A Guide for Parents

 Programs in All Grades

 Programs in Some Grades

Balanced Literacy (K-5)

The English/Language Arts program at Flower Hill Elementary School focuses on the four processes of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These processes, which represent the fundamental core of literacy, are the tools that enable students to communicate. The four processes,  influence one another and therefore are integrated into meaningful and authentic teaching and learning situations.

Guided Reading (K-5)

Clip Art - Woman reading to childrenGuided reading is the heart of the balanced literacy program. The goal of guided reading is to develop strategic independent readers who use comprehension strategies to construct meaning in a wide variety of books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Junior Great Books (K-5)

Junior Great Books combines rich, challenging literature with Shared Inquiry Discussion.  This reading program helps students develop their ability to ask relevant questions, trace ideas throughout a story, pause and reflect while they read, look closely at meaningful words and passages, build interpretations, and elaborate on their ideas through writing.
 

6 + 1 Writing Traits (K-5)

The 6 + 1 trait model has a  huge impact on writing instruction. It allows teachers to identify and plan instruction based on students’ strengths and weaknesses in ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions and presentation.

Writing (K-5)

Writing is a process of communicating meaning. Students write for a variety of purposes. Writing for personal expression involves using figurative language to express thoughts and feelings in personal narratives, poetry, plays, memoirs, friendly letters, fables, folk tales, and various other literary forms. When students write to inform, they explain, describe, state, and organize facts about a topic, and give directions on how to perform a task.  The purpose of writing to persuade is to convince the reader to consider the writer’s point of view.

 

William and Mary (Grades 2-5)

The William and Mary Language Arts Program includes activities and literature that insure challenge for high ability learners.  The readings are broad-based in form and content, allowing for interpretive and evaluative responses.  The program emphasizes the development of analytical responses to literature, persuasive writing skills, listening/oral communication skills, and reasoning.

Letter Identification Intervention (K– 2)

Clip Art - girl reading bookStudents need to recognize that letters are different and each letter serves a different purpose. The purpose of the letter identification intervention is to provide students with the ability to recall names of letters placed in random order so they may be able to differentiate letters quickly in order to begin reading words.

High Frequency Word Intervention (K-3)

The purpose of this intervention is to build students’ reading vocabulary of high frequency words that readers and writers use most often. Although, high frequency words are initially introduced in context, reinforcing these words automatically supports reading and writing fluency.

Soar to Success (Grades 3 -5)

Soar to Success is a small-group reading intervention program. It uses authentic literature, reciprocal teaching, and graphic organizers in fast-paced lessons to help students accelerate their reading growth.  The program is designed to be used with a group of 5-7 students.   This reading intervention program prevents or stops reading failure. Soar to Success is used in conjunction with a regular program of classroom instruction in reading and language arts.