Balanced Literacy Curriculum Essay

Each school day ends with a 20 minute spelling lesson. The lessons come from the Guided Spelling program. The program provides teachers with scripted curriculum, all the teachers have to do is read the text aloud to their class. The lessons are divided into weeks and days. Each week provides students with a new set of words to learn, and each day they develop familiarity with these words. At the end of the week, the students are quizzed on the words. Each lesson has 10 words, the teacher reads these words aloud. The teacher also generally has a rule to share with the class, for instance when to double consonants before suffixes, or how to forma contraction. The students take a few moments to spell each word, and then in unison, spell the word aloud. If students make a mistake, all they do is cross out the word, and put the correct spelling next to it. The lessons are really pain free for both the teachers and the students. The next day, the students work on some new words, and spend time reviewing a few of the more difficult words from the previous day. The literacy curriculum within my placement classroom is expansive. The day begins and …show more content…
For this section of the paper, I will be using these ten components as a measuring sticks with which my current placement classroom’s curriculum will be analyzed and evaluated. The chart below gives a brief overview of the ten components, and whether or not they are being met in this particular classroom in Northfield. As clearly stated in the chart, the ten components Tompkins’ uses to evaluate curriculum are: reading, phonics, reading and writing strategies, vocab, comprehension, literature, content-area study, oral language, writing, and selling. The classroom in which I have been placed has aspects of all but 2 of the components in the ELA