How do grade levels currently plan at your school? What is one accomplishment that you are really proud of from first semester? How do grade levels currently plan at your school? What is one thing that works at your school around ELA planning? Play music for group to move: What is one accomplishment that you are really proud of from first semester? Play music How do grade levels currently plan at your school? What is one thing that works at your school around ELA planning?

Effective ELA Instruction: From Planning to Instruction

Identify a sentence, phrase, and word that resonated with you. The Literacy Jigsaw Puzzle: Assembling the Critical Pieces of Literacy Instruction Read the excerpts Identify a sentence, phrase, and word that resonated with you. In rounds, share the sentence, phrase, and word that resonated with you.

Best Practices in Literacy Instruction Classrooms should reflect a culture that fosters literacy motivation. The teacher should foster literacy by creating a community of literacy learners. Students learn best when they read for authentic meaning-making purposes: for pleasure, to be informed, and to perform a task. Teachers should provide appropriate scaffolded instruction in the five core skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) to promote independent reading. The school day should include time for self-selected reading. Providing students with high-quality literature across a wide range of genres will build a love for reading and address the Common Core standards. Gambrell, Malloy, & Mazzoni, in 2011 identified 10 evidence-based best practices for effective literacy instruction.

The classroom should reflect and encourage As themes or topics are explored, multiple texts should be used to increase background knowledge, connect concepts, and increase vocabulary. The classroom should reflect and encourage community and collaboration. A balance of teacher- and student-led discussions of texts is important to build lifelong learners. Students need ample opportunities to use technologies that connect and expand concepts. 10. Differentiate instruction based on student assessments to accommodate the needs of individual students. Gambrell, Malloy, & Mazzoni, 2011

What is balanced literacy? It involves explicit, systematic, and completely thorough teaching of the skills required to read and write in a classroom environment where there is much reading of authentic literature—including information books, and much composing by students. Balanced literacy instruction is demanding in every way that literacy instruction can be demanding. Students are expected to learn the skills and learn them well enough to be able to transfer them to reading and writing of texts. Yes, this is done in a strongly supportive environment, with the teacher providing a great deal of direct teaching, explanations and re-explanations, and hinting to students about the appropriateness of applying skills they have learned previously to new texts and tasks. As children learn the skills and use them, the demands in balanced classrooms increase, with the goal of the balanced literacy teacher being to move students ahead, so that every day there is new learning; every day students are working at the edge of their competencies and growing as readers and writers. Michael Pressley

Balanced Literacy Modeled Reading/ Writing Shared Reading/ Writing Whole Group Lessons Balanced Literacy Shared Reading/ Writing Small Group Reading/ Writing Collaborative Reading/ Writing Daily CAFÉ/ Writer’s Workshop Student Choice Notice how Daily CAFÉ and Writer’s Workshop align with the balanced literacy framework to build readers and writers. Independent Reading/ Writing Decreasing Support Increasing Independence

To support effective core literacy instruction, the Elementary Language Arts Team recommended the Daily 5/CAFÉ. It is essentially a structure for organizing the literacy block. This structure includes all the key components necessary for effective literacy instruction as identified in a meta-analysis of effective reading teachers (Blair, Rupley, and Nichols, 2007) and multiple research studies conducted by Allington (2007). HANDOUT – FAQs about the Daily 5/CAFÉ Structure The Daily 5/CAFÉ structure includes all the components of balanced literacy instruction and provides time for whole group, small group, and individual instruction. This structure provides time for students to be engaged in authentic literacy tasks that build stamina, demand rigor and vary according to student need. It also provides opportunities for student choice which positively impacts motivation and learning. HANDOUT - Daily CAFÉ Literacy Block Daily 5/CAFÉ Structure 8

How do we plan for this literacy instruction?

Planning is about deciding what to teach but also about knowing your students and thinking about where they are and where you want them to go as readers and writers. Franki Sibberson

There are some basics in planning regardless of the content area There are some basics in planning regardless of the content area. We have added some ideas to this document that Math shared with you.

C-MAPP Pacing Guide Unit Guides Resources Reading and Writing C-MAPP support the collaborative planning process. Think about C-MAPP as an umbrella. The pacing guides help you see the big picture throughout the year. The unit guide provides the big picture for each unit of study.

C-MAPP Resources Highlight the resources: Unpacking Document, pacing guide, I Can statements, ELA CCSS Bookmarks

Let’s take a look at the components of the Unit Guide.

What do you feel is most often overlooked in regard to planning? I think the small scaffolds are critical and often, when we don’t plan big picture, we miss those. The things we are teaching kids as readers are often very complex and without breaking them down ourselves, it is hard to break them down for students. Read, Write, Reflect: Interview with Franki Sibberson http://readwriteandreflect.blogspot.com/2012/09/interview-with-franki-sibberson.html

We have provided a planning template to assist your grade level teams in the collaborative planning process. It is designed to become a living document – perhaps a Google doc. The Unit Planning Guide is designed for the entire grade level to review the unit overview on C-MAPP and think about what the big ideas are for that unit for the entire grade level.

The reading and writing units focus on biographies. I have started the process. As I looked at the units for both reading and writing, I was able to see that the unit focuses on reading and writing biographies.

Now I understand that the planning process is a way for me to understand where I am going and to think through what supports students might need to get there. Read, Write, Reflect: Interview with Franki Sibberson http://readwriteandreflect.blogspot.com/2012/09/interview-with-franki-sibberson.html

Weekly Plan

C-MAPP Pacing Guide Unit Guides Resources Weekly Instructional Guides As you plan and think of your umbrella, the Weekly Instructional Guides are what you hold on to – helping you think about what you need to teach and what your students need. Weekly Instructional Guides

Weekly Plan Intro biography with read aloud Text structure sort Groups based on student data and needs Intro autobiographies through a read aloud Groups based on student data and needs

Think about the word that you selected from the excerpts earlier as well as you new learning today, what are you taking away? A question? An idea? A planning strategy?