By Alene Hill – Metro Independent Contributor
A team of teachers and administrators from kindergarten through sixth grade collaborated for almost a year to design the new English Language Arts Curriculum for Collinsville elementary grade levels.
Photo by Roger Starkey
At its March meeting, the Collinsville school board approved the Elementary Language Arts Curriculum, which includes reading, writing, listening and language.
Vicki Reulecke, director of curriculum and assessment, said the goal of the new curriculum, which is based on the Common Core State Standards adopted by the state of Illinois, is “consistency – the scope, sequence and order of what is taught and when it is taught in the grade.”
First grade teacher Stacey Lauenstein, who has been with the district 19 years, worked on the curriculum project. The new curriculum provides a specific time frame for teaching skills, unlike the Illinois Learning Standards that it is replacing, which is an advantage for new teachers, Lauenstein said.
Before, she said, “standards could be covered in early elementary or late elementary span.” That meant that new teachers had no clear direction of what skills to teach or when to teach them.
“New teachers always had text books,” Lauenstein said. “But they would have to rely on other teachers to know what to teach in a particular grade level.”
The curriculum also means students are building English language skills on the same foundation everywhere in the district.
“It doesn’t matter which elementary building in Collinsville they move into or out of, students are assured they are getting all the standards that are required,” Lauenstein said.
A feature of the new curriculum that engages the students in mastering skills is the addition of “I can” statements – a student’s own response to mastering a standard. The statement can be as simple as “I can hear and say the beginning sound of a word” for a first grader.
The next project, Ruelicke said, is a tweaking of grade cards to reflect the standards. That will help parents from quarter to quarter understand what specific goals a student has mastered and where support may be needed.
Even though the Elementary English Arts Curriculum is complete and has been approved by the board, Ruelicke said it is “not intended to be a static document.
“It will be reviewed and revised as needed,” she said. “While it is finished, it will never be in final form.”
With English instruction standardized across the district, the focus now turns to math, followed by science.
