Literacy

At HKIS, we believe literacy – reading, writing, speaking, and listening, is a keystone to all learning. We value questions as much as answers, process as much as product, and connections as much as content. Literacy is a transdisciplinary skill that enables us to reflect, transform and innovate to better understand the world around us.

Our Upper Primary literacy-curriculum is based on best practices from the United States. Resources and research that inform literacy teaching and learning include literacy workshop practices and Common Core State Standards to ensure consistency across grades and divisions, and provide a challenging and developmentally appropriate curriculum for our students.

R2-12: Common Core State Standards’ Capacities of a Literate Individual

The Common Core Standards offer a larger picture as the capacities of a literate individual. As students grow and advance through the grades, they are able to exhibit these capacities in more sophisticated, consistent, and full ways.

• Literate Individuals demonstrate independence in their thinking, seeking of resources and pursuing their interests. • Literate Individuals build strong content knowledge when they learn to read purposely and listen attentively to peers and experts. • Literate Individuals respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose and discipline by adapting their written and spoken messages. • Literate Individuals comprehend as well as critique when they are engaged and maintain open-mindedness. • Literate Individuals value evidence when supporting their own viewpoints in writing and speaking. • Literate Individuals use technology and digital media strategically and capably to best communicate their ideas. • Literate Individuals come to understand other perspectives, cultures and have the opportunity to vicariously inhabit worlds different from their own.

R2-12: Common Core Literacy Standards

The Reading Literature and Informational

Texts Standards focus on the need to expose our students to a variety of genres in our world. They also emphasize making connections across and comparing texts, being able to define and describe setting, characters and major events, using illustrations to deepen understanding of stories or content, and understanding an author’s message.

The Reading Foundational Skills Standards

focus on phonetic awareness and phonics, which are essential to the decoding process of reading. In addition, the Foundational Skills highlight the need for word recognition and define expectations for reading fluency in order to support comprehension.

The Writing Standards focus on exposing students to three different genres: narrative, opinion and informational. In addition, the standards emphasize the need for a writing process where revision and editing take place regularly as students take their writing pieces through the complete process. Students should also participate in research and share their learning in a variety of ways.

The Speaking and Listening Standards focus on providing ample opportunities for students to take part in a variety of rich and structured conversations – as part of a whole class, in small groups, or with a partner. These standards highlight the importance of learning to be productive speakers by contributing to conversations and responding to partners’ ideas.

The Language Standards focus on conventions, mechanics and syntax of standard English. They also highlight the importance of expanding a student’s vocabulary and exploring “shades of meaning.”

HKIS Upper Primary Literacy Instruction

Reading and Writing Workshops are the primary structures in which Upper Primary students do most of their learning and work as readers and writers. With a predictable structure, ample time for students to actually read and write, and a combination of whole class, small group, and individual instruction, Reading and Writing Workshops allow teachers to differentiate to meet the needs of all students.

Reading Workshop

Reading Workshop most importantly gives students time to read, while practicing the decoding strategies, comprehension strategies, reading behaviors and talking and thinking strategies that are taught through reading mini-lessons. Students are continually challenged to grow and support new ideas about texts and to provide evidence for their thinking.

Teachers support students in choosing books for independent reading from the classroom and school libraries that are just-right and based on student interest. Students are encouraged to choose a balance of literary and informational texts. Students learn to know themselves as readers, set reading goals, take risks and challenge themselves to read books from a variety of genres. An important part of Reading Workshop is one-on-one conferencing between teacher and student based on the student’s current reading.

Read Aloud

Teachers read a carefully chosen book aloud to the whole class, considering diversity and genre. As teachers read, they stop to model their thinking as readers for students. Teachers encourage students to reflect on beautiful language, vocabulary, character traits and choices, and important details. They push students to make connections to real life, other texts, and themselves. Class discussions about read aloud texts scaffold students’ further meaningful independent talk about books.

Shared Reading

Shared reading is often explained as “all eyes on one text”. In the Upper Primary, that may be an enlarged text so that all children can see, or a copy of a paper or digital text. The teacher involves children in reading together.

Guided Reading / Strategy Groups

Teachers work with small groups who are working towards the same reading goals/needs. This is a time when teachers provide explicit instruction to meet the needs of students learning various strategies to support their language, decoding and comprehension skills.

Writing Workshop

The writing process sits at the heart of Writing Workshop. Students compose and draft their own pieces in three writing genres: informational, opinion, narrative. Students follow an authentic writing process that leads them through planning, drafting, revision, editing and publication. Classes often celebrate writing at the end of a unit.

Professional examples of the kinds of texts students are asked to write are provided as “mentor texts”. They encourage students to read as writers, noticing qualities of certain kinds of writing that make it successful. Teachers model their own work as writers. An important part of Writing Workshop is one-on-one conferencing between teacher and student based on the student’s current writing work.

Interactive Writing

Teachers and students work together to plan and compose pieces of writing which allow them to practice the writing process together.

Strategy Groups

Teachers work with small groups who are working towards the same writing goals/needs. This is a time when teachers provide explicit instruction to meet the needs of students learning various writing skills and strategies.

Word Study

Through differentiated small groupings and individual instruction, teachers provide opportunities for students to recognize, learn and apply patterns in words and language. Students develop how words work. Spelling and grammar competency is further fostered through students’ carefully editing their own writing work.

* Source: Common Core State Standards (English Language Arts Introduction) http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/students-who-are-college-and-career-ready-in-reading-writingspeaking-listening-language/