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What is ELA-vate?
ELA-vate is not just a reading curriculum- it is an English Language Arts curriculum that encompasses all five strands of the Utah ELA Core Standards (Reading Literature Texts, Reading Informational Texts, Writing, Language, and Speaking and Listening). Teacher leaders in grades 4-6 from across the Cache County School District worked together to modify and personalize open source curriculum for our community. There are four modules for each grade, each outlining approximately eight weeks of instruction. The modules are linked by guiding questions and big ideas and are scaffolded to develop reading, writing, speaking, and listening proficiencies required to be college and career ready. There are several intentional content area connections to grade level science and social studies concepts. The specific instructional goals of the ELA-vate curriculum are as follows:
Build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and literature:
- Students are exposed to a wide range of increasingly complex texts, both literary and informational, to build background knowledge and interest.
- Students build content knowledge and research skills to build expertise about a topic.
- Students learn to ask strong, text-dependent questions as they read, and do research for a real purpose.
Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational:
- Students cite specific evidence when offering oral or written interpretation of the text(s).
- Performance tasks require students to cite text evidence, to revise their thinking and writing, to critique their own and peers' writing, and to share their writing with a real audience.
Regular practice with complex text and its academic language:
- Students learn to respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.
- Students develop independence to comprehend and evaluate complex texts across a range of text types.
