LITERACY
It is the mission of TUSD to ensure that each student optimizes individual achievement through an educational system characterized by challenging and exciting curricula and inspiring personalized instruction. To achieve this mission, balanced literacy is a structure utilized across TUSD classrooms to ensure that children are provided with multiple opportunities to interact with reading and writing in meaningful ways. The structures serve as a foundation, however the teaching that takes place within each component is the critical element. The signature practices of reading workshop and writing workshop are essential components for supporting children at various levels of proficiency, and classroom libraries serve as the hub for reading materials, as children are matched appropriately with books that align to their individual reading level.
Using the Units of Study,K-5 by Lucy Calkins for both Reading and Writing instruction teachers draw on literacy expertise and lessons gleaned from decades of research, curriculum development, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, teachers, This reading and writing curriculum incorporates the following:
- state-of-the-art tools and methods to help students move up the ladder of text complexity
- build foundational reading skills and strategies
- support the teaching of interpretation, synthesis, and main idea
- offer classroom structures to support inquiry and collaboration
- provide all the teaching points, mini lessons, conferences, and small-group work needed to teach a comprehensive workshop curriculum
- include resources to help teachers build and evolve anchor charts across each unit
- help teachers use learning progressions to assess students’ reading work, develop their use of self-monitoring strategies, and set students on trajectories of growth
- give teachers opportunities to teach and to learn teaching while receiving strong scaffolding and on-the-job guidance.
