English Language Arts
It was Frederick Douglass who said, “Once you learn to read, you will forever be free,” and poet and playwright Victor Hugo who said, “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” At Atlas, we know that proficient reading is essential -- literally impacting all aspects of development, learning, and daily life. We believe that in order to thrive in the 21st century, students must be fluent and critical readers, competent writers, compelling speakers, and careful listeners.
Foundational Reading Skills
Our Kindergarten through 2nd grade students receive structured phonics instruction founded on the science of reading. Our daily hour-long foundation skills block cultivates the brain-based connections needed to support phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and spelling --- all proven to provide the basis for proficient reading and writing in later years.
We use CKLA Skills as our curriculum for foundational skills in the early elementary years. We chose this curriculum because of its sequential, multi-sensory approach. In kindergarten, students begin by developing the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds. Students learn letter-sound correspondences, which begins their journey of learning to read and write. As they progress through first and second grade, children move from single consonant and vowel sounds to one-syllable words to multisyllabic words. Children also develop reading fluency through repeated readings of decodable texts. Students emerge from 2nd grade with a good handle on the most common spelling patterns and generalizations, a strong bank of sight words, and the ability to accurately read unfamiliar words using decoding strategies.
In grades 3-5, we use Lavinia Group’s Foundational Skills curriculum. Through these lessons, students develop word study skills related to syllabication and morphology, strategies to improve their fluency, and techniques to closely read a wide variety of genres. The curriculum follows a weekly structure. For the first four days, students engage in repeated readings of a short text; each day has a distinct focus - word work, fluency, main idea, and craft/structure analysis. Students also engage in discussions about the text and work on strengthening their written responses to text. On the final day of the week, students read a text similar to the one they have read for the previous four days; on this day, students work independently and teachers assess and track their work in order to plan targeted reteaches for the following week.
Our teachers monitor each child’s unique journey of learning to read and write through informal daily assessments, end of unit assessments and more formal benchmarking assessments three times per year. We believe that careful observation of a child’s reading and writing allows us to provide targeted reteaching, additional practice, and more structured intervention when necessary. Students are met where they are, and are supported or challenged with meaningful instruction.
Content-Based Literacy: EL Education Modules
We use EL Education’s ELA Modules; module lessons are a daily one hour block that address the Missouri ELA Learning Standards for speaking and listening, reading literary and informational texts, and writing. Each grade level includes three modules, which span the full school year. The three modules allow students to build important knowledge based on a compelling scientific, literary, or social studies topic. Examples of module topics include: toys and play, weather, animal adaptations, tools and work, literary classics, the American Revolution, and the impact of natural disasters. By studying only three topics per year, our students are able to become experts. They delve deeply into rich texts, build strong academic vocabularies, and create authentic written work related to their learning. These studies build children’s knowledge about the world around them, which fuels reading comprehension and critical thinking.
At Atlas, projects are a natural outgrowth of our learning. At the end of each module, students engage in a project related to the module’s content: fourth graders write and present monologues with different viewpoints on the American Revolution, first graders use tools to design a “magnificent thing” that can help their classroom community, and third graders produce a written report and careful illustration to teach others about a specific type of frog and its adaptations. Our visual and performing arts teachers also work with students on projects related to their modules. After a bird watching field trip, for example, students might create a mural of birds native to St. Louis. Projects serve as a vehicle to teach students to take pride in creating beautiful work and to provide students with an opportunity to make their learning public.
Learning through Place-Based Education
Because of our emphasis on place-based learning, our students regularly go on trips and engage with visitors related to their units of study. We believe that trips, interviews, and hands-on experiences are an essential research tool for young learners; they help our students learn to observe closely, record their findings, and ask questions. Teachers at Atlas carefully plan these experiences so that they align to learning goals and help students delve more deeply into content.
We love finding museums, centers, and organizations that enhance our studies. By the time they finish fifth grade, our students have interacted with a number of important museums and cultural institutions in St. Louis: The St. Louis Zoo, the Old Courthouse, and St. Louis Repertory Theatre, to name a few! Students also learn a great deal from looking closely at “everyday” places. For example, in order to learn more categories of tools, our first graders visit a hardware store and analyze how it is organized. Our second graders take a trip to SLU and interview college students so that they can understand the purpose of college and how it differs from elementary school. Our teachers and curriculum team are always seeking out new experiences for our explorers!