Universal Writing and Reading Updates

Here is a brief overview and update on the Universal Writing and Reading curriculum work that is being developed to ensure that we have a systemic guaranteed literacy curriculum for our students.:

Universal Writing

     

This summer we worked on refining the Universal Writing Curriculum, with the creation of a sample "Launching" Unit.  We will continue our work in November to provide an outline for you two narrative writing units.  I am so pleased with the amount of time during professional development days that we have been given to continue our work in the area of writing.  I love that we are not using the "one and done" philosophy, but continuing to build upon our work.  

Universal Reading

We had a group of over 30 teachers and administers attend a universal reading framework workshop for three days in August.  We worked on analyzing our current universal reading instruction and began to develop belief statements and reading frameworks for the five pillars of reading instruction: Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.  Here is the literacy vision/belief statment we created: 

Pulaski Community School District Literacy Belief Statements:

All students will be college, career, and community ready readers provided:

• equal access to quality, balanced- literacy instruction
• interaction with a variety of high-quality texts in all disciples
• instruction and multiple opportunities to communicate, in a variety of ways, for a variety of purpose, about reading, in a culturally-responsive environment
• all staff will be engaged in on-going professional development and collaboration in order to implement research-based literacy practices

This vision is what will be the anchor to guide our district universal literacy work.  The reading committee will meet several times throughout the school year to work specifically on universal Reading Pillars of Comprehension and Vocabulary Instruction.  As part of the process we will review our current practices and begin to make sure that we are aligning our curriculum, instruction, and classroom assessment to research-based practices and the current reading standards.  Our goal is to develop a scope and sequence and units to guide our universal reading instruction and provide for system-wide consistency.  

We realize that this process is a multiple year process. We will keep you up to date along the way.  

Thank you for your patience as we work through this process.  We would rather get it done the right way, than to be fast and have too many gaps to go back and patch.