COMPREHENSIVE ELA INSTRUCTION

WIT & WISDOM, FUNDATIONS®, AND GEODES ALIGNMENT COMPREHENSIVE ELA INSTRUCTION Wit & Wisdom is a comprehensive Kindergarten through Grade 8 English Language Arts curriculum developed by and for teachers. Each Wit & Wisdom module centers on the study of rich and engaging texts, curated to build student knowledge of important ideas in the liberal arts and sciences. Wit & Wisdom provides the knowledge-building and standards-aligned integrated instruction essential to literacy success. The curriculum provides the complex texts students need to be strong in reading comprehension. Wit & Wisdom should be paired with a strong, research-based foundational skills program in Kindergarten through Grade 3. Fundations®, published by Wilson Language Training, is a multisensory structured literacy program for students in Kindergarten through Grade 3. Students receive systematic, cumulative, and explicit instruction in the foundational reading skills of phonemic awareness, phonics and word study, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension strategies, as well as the foundational writing skills of handwriting, spelling, and proofreading. Students in Fundations® classrooms master the foundational skills of decoding accuracy and transcription (handwriting and spelling). The Fundations® program actively engages students in their learning and differentiates instruction to meet the needs of students in a Tier 1 and Tier 2 setting. It is designed to be combined with a literature-based program in order to address comprehension and writing more thoroughly. Fundations® and Wit & Wisdom can be paired to provide a comprehensive literacy solution for students in Kindergarten through Grade 3; together, they address states’ college- and career-readiness standards. Geodes, the result of a collaboration with Wilson Language Training, is a collection of accessible, knowledge-building books for developing readers. Following the scope and sequence of Fundations and the topic-based knowledge progression of Wit & Wisdom, Geodes Readables are a unique type of text in which specific decoding strategies are coupled with content and vocabulary. Geodes texts enable students to apply newly learned sound-spelling patterns and practice with phonemic awareness and phonics while building knowledge in history, science, and the arts. While most early literacy books are quite basic, Geodes texts are rich with facts and ideas that spark students’ curiosity about the world around them.