Curriculum Update ~ May 31, 2022
Dear Parents, Guardians, and Community Members,
LCSD’s Literacy Leadership Team (LLT) has completed their PreK-8th grade literacy audit and curriculum review. LCSD offered a few different options for parents and community members to provide feedback on the potential switch: we hosted one parent night at LCIS, took the Mobile Learning Center out in the community to make it easier for parents to attend, utilized our Family Connectors to call families, and had the curriculum available at our Literacy Carnival night at LCES. We gathered quite a bit of feedback from parents and community members through this process. The feedback data was added to the rest of the data that had been collected over the course of the year-long process.
After a thorough review of the data, a final recommendation was made to the school board and Superintendent. The Superintendent supported the recommendation made by the LLT. We are excited to announce that we are adopting a new literacy curriculum, CKLA/Amplify for grades PreK-8th. We are looking forward to increased alignment, better engagement, and improved reading scores with this CDE approved literacy curriculum. Although we will be implementing a new literacy curriculum, we will continue the work we have done with CREW, Habits of a Learner, Cornerstone Days, and field work. We truly value the input from our community and the results we have seen from this work over the past few years.
Hear what our team has to say:
“Supporting our students’ literacy growth has been a passion of mine and being part of the Literacy Leadership Team allowed me to participate in a systematic and thoughtful process, which led us to choosing our new CKLA curriculum. One of the steps we took was to observe the CKLA curriculum being used at another elementary school. I was inspired and thrilled to see the students engaged through vivid discussions and readings. I cannot wait to be part of our scholars’ learning through diverse topics and literacy supports that will positively impact their lives! “ Clare Mulcey- Former 2nd Grade Teacher and Current K-4 Literacy Specialist
“I am really excited about the new curriculum! I just got a chance to see how it works in an initial implementation training. My favorite aspects of the curriculum so far are:
- Automatic differentiation for three different ability levels (significant support, light support, and core learning), as well as additional multilingual support and above grade-level extensions–for a total of five different areas of differentiation.
- The chance to really use our one-to-one Chromebooks for some authentic and rigorous opportunities to learn 21st century skills, as well as many opportunities to work with visual aspects of learning (graphs, polls, and graphic organizers).
- Tons of opportunities for students to talk to each other about their reading and writing on a daily basis.
- Texts that push our readers, and are really interesting. I can’t wait for the research unit on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
- Many extra resources and units that are flexible for the needs of students, and for our support and intervention teachers to dig their teeth into.” -Jeff Sailor- 7th Grade ELA
Schools began professional development for the new curriculum on May 20, 2022. The district will continue to provide ongoing support throughout the next few years to ensure staff receive what they need. We are working diligently to ensure that this switch is as seamless as possible for both students and staff.
We will continue to keep you informed as we move forward with this process. Please feel free to reach out to principals or myself with any questions. We would love to talk with you!
Sincerely,
Andi Weigel, M.Ed.
Collaborative Director
