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The primary goal of the literacy program is to produce reflective, critical, and creative thinkers through the language experiences of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Teachers meet the needs of learners by creating an interpretive community in which students are engaged in transforming information and experience into knowledge and understanding.
In response to the literacy shifts in Connecticut's Common Core State Standards, a range and variety of appropriately complex, high-quality texts create the foundation of our balanced literacy classrooms. All elements of reading and writing are integrated to support and enhance student learning. Utilizing a gradual release approach, teachers model skills and strategies that support learning, provide guided practice and shared reading opportunities, and assign differentiated independent practice to all students. Thoughtfully selected shared and mentor texts provide students with a wide variety of models for reading and writing. All students work with meaningful, grade-level fiction and nonfiction texts, in addition to practicing and applying literacy skills and concepts to other authentic texts, chosen based on interest, reading level, and/or thematic relevance. Strategic guided and small group reading pairs students with texts at their instructional level and provides a ladder for continuous literacy progress. Students construct and share meaning derived from texts through discourse and written response. Extended written pieces develop through a process, including prewriting, rehearsing, composing, conferring, revising, editing and sharing. Teachers incorporate varied and strategic instructional strategies to support the individual needs of students, continually scaffolding learning to involve reading and producing increasingly complex texts.
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