PEORIA, Ill. (25 News) – Students in kindergarten through fifth grade in Peoria Public Schools will officially be going back to phonics and paper to improve literacy rates in the district.
This comes after the board approved a new literacy curriculum Monday night at the school board meeting. The new curriculum costs almost $2 million, piecing together plans that include grammar, literacy and writing.
According to PPS curriculum coordinator Lindsey Bohm, the current curriculum is from 2017, and it was time for an update after it sunsets at the end of June.
Bohm told the board current core resources were not fully aligned with evidence-based practices.
With the current curriculum, teachers had to piece together literacy plans that included grammar, literacy and writing. Now, teachers will be able to get all of it into one, while also introducing science and social studies for kindergarten to fourth grade.
The newly adopted curriculum is one year in the making, with pilot programs showing success rates in students using core literacy.
“It’s going to somewhat bring back those topics (science and social studies) to K-4, whereas in the age of common core, a lot of times I know in elementary spaces, it’s been math and reading, and science and social studies have taken a back seat, if present at all, and have been pushed for 5-8,” said Bohm.
“By rotating the knowledge-building topics on the unit to a science topic or a social studies topic, our teachers piloting have found that the students were really engaged in learning about rot, for example, as a science topic.”
Bohm continues to explain that in her example, students got a chance to dive into both literary text in fiction and informational text to piece concepts and consolidate their learning.
Teachers selected three resources to pilot based on data and piloted them for three school quarters. From the ones piloted, the top choice for K-4 was Magnetic Literacy and Mosaico, which focuses on magnetic reading.
According to the website for Magnetic Literacy, magnetic reading can be described as research-based instruction informed by practical classroom experience, an understanding of the cultural and developmental needs of all learners, and the science of reading.
The board voted separately on the literacy curriculum for fifth graders.
Bohm argued fifth graders should be using similar material to students in 6-8 grade. The curriculum for fifth graders would be HMH Into Reading and Arriba la Lectura.
The cost of the new program is just over $1.89 million, but Bohm said this will be for a six-year subscription to the curriculum, and it’s an investment into improving the district’s literacy scores from its current 30% and another 20% of students reaching proficiency, according to Bohm.
“The first step in ensuring that we are all working toward the same goal of improving literacy rates is providing our teachers with evidence-based resources that they can turn to and make sure that everyone in Peoria Public Schools, every student in every building, is experiencing the same quality of teaching and curriculum,” said Bohm.
(Reporting by Angeles Ponpa)
