English Language Arts Standards post 1

I have been writing a post on the Common Core English Language Arts standards for about a week now... and I have come to the conclusion that there are too many for me to write about and summarize in one post.  I suppose I will have to break it up into at least two posts. 

One thing I do want to include in this post is the suggested texts for Kindergarten and 1st grade.  A selection follows:

Kindergarten

• Over in the Meadow (John Langstaff)
• A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog (Mercer Mayer)
• Pancakes for Breakfast (Tomie DePaola)
• I Read Signs (Tana Hoban)
• Amazing Whales! (Sarah L. Thomson)

1st Grade

• Mr. Poppers Penguins (Richard Atwater)
• Little Bear (Else Homelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak)
• Frog and Toad Together (Arnold Lobel)
• Starfish (Edith Thacher Hurd)
• Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean (Arthur Dorros)

A caveat is noted in the standards, "Children at the kindergarten and grade 1 levels should be expected to read texts independently that have been specifically written to correlate to their reading level and their word knowledge.  Many of the titles listed above are meant to supplement carefully structured independent reading with books to read along with a teacher or that are read aloud to students to build knowledge and cultivate a joy in reading."

I love many of these suggested books and I think it is wonderful to include a variety of literature in the classroom.  In fact, right now I'm adding many of these books to my daughter's Amazon wishlist.

Common Core Mathematics standards

First of all, let's look at the Standards for Mathematical Practice in the Common Core Standards for Mathematics...  There are 8 overall standards:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
4. Model with mathematics
5. Use appropriate tools strategically
6. Attend to precision
7. Look for and make use of structure
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

New Common Core standards

On Monday, the New York Times reported on some schools adoption of the new Common Core standards for education. Since I had been researching private schools already I decided to have a look at the new public standards. The standards are broken up into two parts, English Language Arts and Mathematics. I'll tackle them separately in separate posts. I do have a couple of comments on the standards as a whole.

The standards are presented in a "what a child needs to know" format. For example, things a Kindergartner is expected to learn in English or Mathematics. This is nice because it is what I was searching for in terms of curricula (like I mentioned in my previous post).

But it doesn't seem that new. It seems to me like a focus on the "3 R's" (you remember, reading, riting and rithmetic). Haven't we been focusing on the 3 R's since I was in elementary school? And, as I would expect from a national "initiative", it is written in a bureaucratic language with plenty of weasel-words.

Great ideas for curricula

One of the things I've been most nervous about so far in my homeschool planning has been what I would even teach to a first grader? I don't remember first grade very well, let alone what I actually was taught. I found a couple of books on the subject of "what does your child learn in grade ". I also found a couple of nice websites with this same information! (maybe not as detailed):

What you can expect in 1st Grade

Grade by Grade Learning (from PBS)

My husband also suggested I look into what kids are learning at the top private schools in the country. So I found the top 20 prep schools, and looked at a few of the top 10. I found some really cool ideas there for K-2nd grades.

• In Kindergarden, these students are studying how the basic needs of food and clothing are met around the world and start learning about communities at different scales.
  
• The kids are always writing journals and are encouraged to write in all different genre.
• In mathematics the students learn how to express their problem-solving strategies both verbally and through writing to help them understand their own thinking and problem-solving process.

There are too many cool points to list here, but overall it seems that the students in these private schools are expected to write about all aspects of their education, and they engage in more complicated projects than I would have expected for younger children (which I think is great!). They are expected to utilize the scientific method extensively. Another thing to note, across the board these schools seem to heavily integrate all subjects. Social studies, language arts, science, math, and art will all stem from one major overall focus for the school year. So they aren't segregating the subjects and saying, "now we will study math." I definitely don't remember my personal public school experience being that integrative, and I think it is an important way to view the world and encourage children to learn.