Balanced Literacy Curriculum

The essential components of a balanced literacy program are Comprehension, content area study, Literacy strategies and skills, literature, oral language, phonemic awareness and phonics, reading, vocabulary and writing.
Comprehension is the understanding portion of literacy . Without comprehension children will not understand what they are reading it would be like a non-Spanish speaker reading Spanish words, they can sound out the words phonetically but they have no idea what the words mean or what they are saying.
Content area study is the integrated part of the program. This is where you put the topic throughout your school day; say you are working on recycling in Social Studies you can incorporate that topic in reading, by reading a book
Like “I before e except after c. Unless it is pronounced “A” like in neighbor and weigh;” and the word weird is just “weird”. We teach them about suffixes’ and prefixes’ and how they can change the meaning of words.
Literature involves the different genres and their many different structures and features that we expose our student to. As teaches we should expose our student to fiction and nonfiction work, the many different types of poetry and help them works of their own. Even Kindergarten students can create written works, the students can dictate while the teacher writes their words. Oral language, the speaking portion of a balanced literacy program involves the students and teacher talking. Whether it is in discussing an issue with peers, or giving an oral presentation, oral communication is an important part of learning. Also having a student re-tell a story is an excellent way to check the students understanding of the
We teach our student that when someone is reading out loud or doing quit work they should show respect by not talking and disrupting or disturbing the other students. We teach our students safety, not only safety in the classroom but safety in the world around them. We teach them about safe touches in health classes, about hot and cold in science classes and about our environment in reading. We teach our student to trust us so they can feel safe in the classroom and know that if there's an issue at home, at the playground and in the classroom they can rely on us to make a difference. To create a community of learners we need to let our students know that we have high expectations on the work they do, be it reading, writing or in any of the other content areas. We should also teach our students to aim high for themselves to not take the easy road, not read the same book over and over again during independent reading, not play and talk to the same students every day, we should teach them to challenge themselves, make a new friend everyday, read a new book everyday. We need to teach our students how to work in groups how to get