Aspen Academy
Curriculum Connections
from Curriculum Coordinator, Maggie Rowan
Parent Information to Help You Help Your Kids!
Literacy Skills:
What is literacy? It is being capable of reading and writing. This is more than the ability to simply read a text, but the act of engaging with a piece of writing through discussion, writing, art and more. A literature rich curriculum focus on students having literacy, being able to read and write, across the school day and not just during ‘reading’ time. There are many small skills, building blocks, which lead to creating a student who is literate. We may begin this kind of instruction in a designated time in school, but we strive to show students how skills meant for literacy cross our day.
Skill Focus
One important skill that stretches across the Minnesota State Standards not only from kindergarten to eighth grade, but also throughout our lives, is to follow the events in a piece of text and be able to discuss those events. The logical practice of this skill is to have students read, or read to a student, and have the student list what happened in the story, concentrating on the more important events. While this is a logical place to start with this skill, we need to practice it in multiple ways in multiple places to cement its use. How can you do that? Here is a list of ways to practice the skill of following and then discussing story events (this can be done orally, written out or drawn depending on age/ability):
- Draw/Tell about the events of a television show or movie or video game, especially one never watched before
- When you are done making a meal, draw/tell the steps needed to make the meal
- After arriving at a destination, discuss the places you passed on the way
- When shopping, list the places that you went in the store and draw/tell why you went to each place.
- Share the events of a favorite memory with someone who did not experience it
- Draw key events of a book
- Build models of key events of a text using clay, legos, etc.
Singapore Math
The math curriculum we use is Singapore Math that has be rearranged to best fit with the Minnesota State Standards per grade level. This curriculum originated in Singapore in this version about 1992. It is a visual and language focused problem solving based curriculum. It goes from the concrete to the abstract thinking, helping students learn skills instead of rote memorization. Students work on learning how to manipulate numbers in different ways as well as visual representations that help lead to abstract, algebraic thinking.
Skill Focus
The basis for much of Singapore Math and the Minnesota State Standards is the concept of numbers and place value. Students as young as kindergarten learn to recognize groups of manipulatives and pictures of items up to ten as quickly as possible. From there, this instant recognition of numbers builds into finding groups of ten, then groups of tens and beyond. Students learn to write numbers in expanded form and in words and how to round. Place value also includes an understanding of decimals as tenths, hundredths and beyond. There are some key terms and skills to practice with students in this area. Here is a list of things to work on:
- Write in words/Written Form: Number words are spelled out
o Ex: 20 becomes twenty and 0.79 becomes seventy-nine hundredths
- Expanded Form: Numbers are written using their place value
o Ex: 785 = 700 + 80 + 5 and 1.45 = 1 + .40 + .05
- Place Value: How much a digit is worth based on the location in the number
o Ex: In the number 503, the value of the digit 5 is 500
- More or Less: Making a number more or less by a set amount
o Ex: 300 more than 1340 is 1640; .001 less than 7.3041 is 7.3031
- Rounding: Changing numbers to work by 10s, 100s, .1, .01 etc
o Rounding 73 to the nearest ten is 70 and 9.124 to the nearest hundredth is 9.12
- Arrange Numbers: Putting them in order from least to greatest or the reverse
o 352 comes before 362; 3.1 comes before 3.19
- Digit: The characters 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are digits. They do not have value until placed in a number.
Core Knowledge
This is a curriculum created by E.D. Hirsch to build students who had the knowledge to act as strong citizens of the United States. It was created through looking for common ideas and themes used in historical and modern cultural works. These common ideas and themes were transferred into a spiral curriculum that builds student understanding and knowledge across many curricula areas.
Skill Focus
One of the most important skills used across curriculum of Core Knowledge is note-taking. It is a hard skill to master and needs constant practice, but yet is of vital importance throughout life. Research shows that students who learn and work to master this skill gain more each year in terms of understanding and mastering information. Students should not learn to take verbatim notes as research shows that this is one of the least effective methods because the student uses all of their memory to record and does spend any time analyzing. Note-taking is about analyzing the information being given and recording that which is pertinent to the topic. It is not a one time only way to gather information, but dynamic wherein students should add and delete and reorganize information as it becomes clearer. The most effective use of notes is as a study guide for test preparation. There are many different formats wherein teachers may instruct students in taking notes. Students may learn to take notes by following a teacher model, building an outline, webbing information together or even drawing pictures, especially with young students. Encourage your students to bring home notes, make notes when they are reading, explain the notes they took to someone else, rewrite/reorganize notes as a way to prepare for a test and more.
