Thursday, June 6, 2013
~Summer Curriculum~
The first 3 days of my summer vacation were spent writing curriculum!!! Our district is transitioning to the Iowa Core Curriculum and I was asked along with a peer teacher to take on the task of revamping and realigning our Reading Curriculum to match. Unfortunately with our budget, we were only allowed 20 hours and though we accomplised a lot, we did not even put a dent in the Core. We spent all 20 hours in a room together discussing, modifying, analyzing, and brainstorming what district assessments we could improve. Our goal was to focus on the Foundational Skills and come up with assessments for all. A good chunk of these assessments focused on phonemic awareness skills (23 to be exact)! Our major adoption and change to our curriculum in Kindergarten was with our high frequency words. Currently we had 30 words students needed to master by the end of the school year. At the end of our 20 hours we agreed with grades 1 and 2 that we now needed to adopt a new word list (Fry's Word List) and now have a total of 75 words for our students to master from August-May. This will definitely be a significant change for us and our students, but we are up for the challenge.
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So you aren't the only teacher that is negotiating the Iowa common core on the fly? The positive thing is that you are working collaboratively with peers on implementation and interpretation.
ReplyDeleteHow do you think the kids will do with "Fry's Word List"?
I helped transition our Math Core as well last year and now helped with Reading/Language Arts. It makes me feel like I have a much better understanding of what I am teaching and what each standard means for sure!!
ReplyDeleteI am nervous to see how students will do. The majority I think will be just fine and have no problem..... the students that struggle already with only 30 words, will get a lot of "drill and kill" to help them identify their 100 words unfortunately!
My school district has been working on our transition to the Common (Iowa) Core for a couple of years now. It definitely has been a challenge along the way. As a Social Studies teacher, we even wrote a brand new curriculum for 7th grade to better align the needs of our students from the 5-8 grades.
ReplyDeleteI believe your positive outlook on it will carry you through! We are still working on coming up with a list of Social Studies specific vocabulary words that we should focus on!