Standards and Curriculum

Our school follows a curriculum from Focused Instruction for our reading instruction. The curriculum that is given either feels too constricting since it does not take into account the experiences and culture of my students or it doesn’t actually hit on all the standards. Due to this, when planning and instructing, we have to make sure that we adapt the curriculum we are given to meet our students’ needs or to even just meet certain standards that are not reached with the curriculum. The standard 5.10.4.4 (exemplified in the screenshot below) identifies using roots and affixes as a context clues strategy to determine the meaning of unknown words. Nothing within the curriculum has us explicitly teach this standard in a unit. The evidence below shows how we took standards that we were given and adapted curriculum to ensure that students were receiving the appropriate instruction.  

Since our curriculum did not provide any explicit ways to teach roots, our team decided to create our own ways to ensure students were learning the material. The curriculum stated to have students “use context clues” to find meaning of unknown words in “Esperanza Rising”. In order to scaffold this more, the first change we implemented to the curriculum was the creation of a “root wall”. The root wall (pictured below) allowed us to incorporate roots into everyday learning, rather than just a one-time experience. According to Barbara Moss in “Making Independent Reading Work”, it is important for students to learn words contextually rather than out of context like memorizing vocab words. Therefore, we do a mini game to introduce a new root for the week and put it above the root tree. Then, as students find the roots within their own independent reading books, they put it on the root tree along with a definition. The root tree has helped students take ownership over their own words and use strategies contextually. We also have students record this in their journals.

The second adaptation we made was the creation of a root word wall. While students were finding words contextually, we also wanted them to be familiar with an abundance of words within each root. Students created the word wall (pictured below) on their own by finding five words that contains the root and writing the definition on it the paper.This helped students understand how the definition of the root was embedded into the definition of the word. For example, students knew “mis” meant “not” and “mistake” meant “Not doing something correctly.” The word wall has helped students think of creative words and the process of creating definitions.

Last, we took all of these strategies and as we are reading “Esperanza Rising”, we have students use the strategies of roots to understand the meaning of unknown words. Rather than doing what the curriculum suggested and just teach students to find roots within words, we adapted the curriculum to implement scaffolds that would allow students to be successful based on where they were at coming into the school year.