Reading Reconsidered Curriculum
Build students’ knowledge, writing skills, and love of books with our English curriculum.
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What’s Distinctive About Our Curriculum
Knowledge Building
Research tells us that background knowledge is at least as important to reading comprehension as reading “skills.” Knowledge—of history, science, literary terms, vocabulary—is the chicken and the egg. Knowledge is the outcome of successful reading as well as the wellspring that feeds it.
Our approach to building and reinforcing knowledge is both text-specific and long-term. From a text-specific perspective, we infuse our lessons with directly useful knowledge to increase how much students understand of and learn from that particular text. From a long-term perspective, we seek to build a strong base of knowledge that increases student understanding of important ideas and concepts that they are likely to encounter in the future, and we provide cognitive research-based ways of encoding that knowledge into long term memory.
Writing Intensive
Writing is among the most important thinking work that students can do. It’s also among the most challenging tasks for students, and one of the hardest to teach. We think strong lessons should make sure that students learn to write as a way to develop and refine their understanding of text. Our curriculum asks students to write—constantly—in three different ways:
- Developmental writing consists of exercises, embedded in the content of the reading, that seek to develop students’ syntactic control by focusing on craft at the sentence level.
- Formative writing consists of exercises that let students use writing as a tool to develop and expand their thinking—to “think in writing.”
- Summative writing asks students to form and develop paragraphs that explain and provide evidence for a more developed argument about the text.
Novel Centric
Our units seek to put the text—and often reading the text with classmates—at the center of the lesson. One of the first things you’ll notice about our curriculum is that lesson objectives are text-driven: they describe what we want students to understand about the passage of text they are reading that day. Most likely you will never see the same lesson objective twice. They’re unique to each lesson because they are specific to the passage or text.
We ask students to engage with text in three different ways: Accountable Independent Reading (silent, autonomous reading), Control the Game (shared read-aloud between students and teachers), and Read Aloud (teachers reading texts out loud). These last two forms of reading are especially important to us and represent a departure from many curriculums. Reading, we believe, competes with other forms of media for students’ attention and interest. Using social oral reading is a powerful way to build a culture of pleasure not only in texts but also in the act of reading. Students hearing their teacher and peers read out loud with joy and expression connects them to the idea that the book is relevant, worthwhile, and joyful.
Modular
We think a great curriculum should be modular, meaning that a school or a teacher can choose from a variety of outstanding texts at a given grade level to assemble their own scope and sequence for the year. Our curriculum is built in roughly six-week units, and schools can purchase one unit or as many as they wish.
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Novels
Choose the novels you want to read with your students.
Grade 5
Lexile Level: 770 – 1080
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (670)
• Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan (750)
• One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (750)
• The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis (790)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (810)
• A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park (920)
• Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick (930)
• Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis (950)
Grade 6
Lexile Level: 855 – 1165
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (750)
• One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (750)
• The Giver by Lois Lowry (760)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (780)
• Heroes, Gods, and Monsters by Bernard Evslin (800)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (920)
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (990)
• Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1020)
Grade 7
Lexile Level: 925 – 1235
• House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (870)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (920)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (920)
• Lord of The Flies by William Golding (940)
• The Wanderings of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliff (1220)
• Narrative Short Story Unit
Grade 8
Lexile Level: 985 – 1295
• A Raisin in The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (920)
• Lord of The Flies by William Golding (940)
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1000)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (1090)
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1170)
• Sci-Fi Short Fiction Unit
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Units in Development
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (800)
The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich (970)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (940)
Poetry Collection
I Am Malala: Young Reader’s Edition by Malala Yousafzai (830)
We believe many of these books can be used at different grade levels than we have proposed and support your using them as you see fit. In several cases, we have proposed books at two levels because particular considerations (e.g., mature content) or opportunities for enrichment exist.
Samples
Click below to see examples from our One Crazy Summer unit.
Overview and day-by-day snapshot of the unit, including objectives and standards alignment
One-page study and reference tool of the key knowledge built over the course of the unit
Teacher-facing guide to the day’s lesson
Student-facing printable with writing space and embedded nonfiction
Videos
See teachers and students in action with the Reading Reconsidered Curriculum.
Watch Christine Torres teach and practice Explicit Vocabulary with her 5th graders as part of the Number the Stars unit.
In this clip, Sarah Wright uses Turn and Talk and Cold Call to review a Do Now with her 6th graders during the Esperanza Rising unit.
During the Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry unit, Hasan Clayton asks his students to make connections between the novel and a nonfiction article about the time period.
Contact
We’d love to hear from you!
Interested in learning more, piloting a unit, or have specific implementation questions? Please reach out to us at: