Literacy Curriculum

In Hamilton County Schools, the literacy curriculum is: 

• Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency +
• The Continuum of Literacy Learning + 
• You (the living curriculum).

In teaching reading, we really only have one goal: to develop strategic, independent readers. In teaching writing, our goal is develop independent writers who can communicate effectively. Our curriculum is entirely focused on realizing these goals.

• BAS: a formative assessment tool that helps us learn about our students as readers; it’s primary goal is to find each child’s instructional level for our use in planning guided reading
  
• CLL: What students need/are ready to learn; what to teach; what to look for/notice in our students’ learning
  
• Comp & Flu: The “why” and the “how” of good literacy instruction
  
• You: the professional; a noticing teacher; the one who notices student behaviors and abilities in literacy, builds on individual strengths, and develops strategic, independent readers

I found it interesting to learn that the CLL and the Comp & Flu initially were supposed to be one book, but they wouldn’t fit together in one binding. Each text is wonderful on its own but also incomplete.

Since these texts are now a significant part of our literacy curriculum (the other part being you), we will be focusing our professional learning more and more on these texts. I hope you are as thrilled about the arrival of this tool as I am! I wish I’d had it ten years ago.