PS 98Q - The Douglaston School

Reading

HMH Into Reading provides the tools students need to develop critical and strategic thinking skills for the 21st century. Students develop a lifelong love of reading through the extensive library of engaging, award winning, culturally relevant texts that span a wide variety of genres. During instruction, students learn how to recognize genre characteristics, cite text evidence, and draw from their growing bank of skills and strategies helping them make meaning from complex grade-level texts. The ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend and build knowledge. Therefore, HMH Into Reading’s approach is to focus on skills and strategies that best support the specific text that students are reading. By continually spiraling through skills that are in service of texts, rather than texts being in service of a weekly skill, students gradually learn to draw from many skills and strategies to comprehend what they read. Throughout the year, texts increase in complexity, so students are applying the same grade-level appropriate skill to increasingly more complex text.

HMH Into Reading supports content area connections that are critical to learning. Literacy instruction provides the “how” for what students learn in science, social studies, mathematics and the arts. For example, as students read and talk about text, they will naturally build background and knowledge and grade-level cross-curricular topics and content standards.

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Writing 

HMH Into Reading provides daily opportunities for students to express their understanding and thinking, and effective writing and communication skills to help them succeed in today’s world. The program supports the full range of writing modes and forms, scaffolding the steps of the writing process, while also developing students’ ability to have productive, collaborative conversations. Through this instruction, students learn to plan and then draft their writing, share their ideas with others, and evaluate what they write. These steps lead students to revise, edit, and finally produce a final product to publish within or beyond their classroom community. Sharing one’s writing in draft and final form is an important part of the writing process, in part because sharing helps develop collaboration and community through giving and receiving feedback and ideas (Graham et al., 2012).

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P.S. 98 is part of the  Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. The goal of this project is to help young people become avid and skilled readers, writers, and inquirers. All teachers receive ongoing professional development  to support students in this goal.  The organization has developed state-of-the-art tools and methods for teaching reading and writing, for using performance assessments and learning progressions to accelerate progress, and for literacy-rich content-area instruction.

Please visit http://readingandwritingproject.org (external link) for more information about TCRWP.

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Fundations

At P. S. 98 we implement Fundations K-2 during word study period as part of comprehensive literacy instruction. Fundations is a multisensory and systematic phonics, spelling, and handwriting program that benefits all students by providing strong foundational skills. Fundations is designed as a whole-class, general education program used for prevention (Tier 1) purposes. It also can be taught in a small group or 1:1 setting for intervention (Tier 2). Fundations thoroughly teaches the foundational skills, and significantly supports the reading, writing and language standards found in states’ rigorous college- and career-ready standards and the NYS Next Generation Learning Standards. Informed by an extensive research base and following principles of instruction demonstrating success for a wide variety of learners, key features include: 

• Letter formation

• Phonological and phonemic awareness

• Sound mastery

• Phonics, word study, and advanced word study

• Irregular (trick) word instruction

• Vocabulary

• Fluency 

• Comprehension strategies 

• Written composition (spelling and handwriting)

 

Heggerty

• Daily phonemic awareness lessons K-2 to supplement our Fundations curriculum.

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