[ Curriculum Statements ]

READING STATEMENT
CROSSROADS ACADEMY
September, 2001 

Philosophy
Reading education at Crossroads Academy will employ developmentally appropriate methods and materials that enable all students to learn the skills necessary to construct meaning from a wide range of written text.

Guiding Principles
Strong reading skills are the foundation of academic scholarship. Reading can be broadly defined as two distinct skills: decoding and comprehension. Decoding involves reading individual words in isolation. Comprehension is the ability to correctly interpret the author’s intended meaning from text. Students must be taught to decode words with speed and accuracy.  This requires teaching decoding skills (through phonics instruction) as well as building an extensive sight word vocabulary. When decoding is automatic readers are free to think about the words they are reading. Effective readers accurately construct meaning by fluently decoding and correctly interpreting the author’s words. The ultimate goal in reading is to gain understanding and appreciation of the written word. Choosing quality books for instruction is key to our curriculum. Reading is one academic area in which the materials selected by the teacher are just as important as the skills taught and the methods of instruction (see Appendix A for a detailed description of how we select materials). We aim to impart to all students a high degree of literacy in all genres of reading. This goal requires parental support and cooperation.

Implementation Plan
At Crossroads we understand that learning to read is one of the most complex of all academic tasks. Students must accurately identify written symbols, combine symbols to form words, and construct meaning from the words. We employ a variety of proven teaching strategies to help our students become proficient readers. Phonics is taught through direct instruction in kindergarten, first, and second grades. The emphasis in direct instruction then shifts in third grade and above to comprehension. Students practice comprehension by reading and responding to a text on several levels. They read for factual information and answer questions by using direct quotations from the text; they interpret the material by making inferences from the text and using quotations to support their answer; they also evaluate the material, making judgments about it and applying knowledge they have from outside the text itself; and they analyze the writing techniques the author uses in the text. We do provide decoding review, maintenance, and some direct instruction as needed on an individual basis in third and fourth grades. We can best serve students who are able to master grade level reading skills, and those who read above grade level (in our chosen curriculum). Students who read significantly above or below grade level may require other support or stimulation provided by resources outside of the school.