Every child deserves access to rigorous grade-level content. Too often, early literacy instruction focuses only on word recognition and not on reading comprehension. Consequently, students do not frequently have the opportunity to build knowledge through the texts they read.
By providing students with rich text sets beginning at the earliest grades, allowing them to read to learn while learning to read, every child can build the knowledge they need to grow and succeed alongside their peers.
We’ve often heard that students learn to read and then read to learn. The transformation from learning to read and then reading to learn supposedly happens between Grades 2 and 3. But what if the line between those two skills is not that clear cut?
Scarborough’s Rope is a visual depiction of everything students need to become successful readers. This image shows all the strands of reading students need to develop over time to be not only automatic readers but readers who can make meaning of the text they read.
(Image courtesy Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001)
In Grades K–2, students are learning to read. Students engage in a lot of word recognition instruction in the early grades—building phonological awareness, decoding skills, and sight recognition of familiar words. All these skills help students become increasingly automatic in their reading.
But what good does it do for students to be automatic readers if they don’t understand what they read? Building language comprehension is critical to literacy success, even in the early grades. In early elementary grades, students must learn to read and read to learn at the same time. As students move into Grade 3 and beyond, language comprehension becomes the primary focus of instruction.
Building language comprehension is what makes students increasingly strategic readers. At all grade levels, students benefit from receiving literacy instruction that builds their knowledge of content areas and language structures, enhances their vocabulary, and helps them improve their verbal reasoning.
As one might predict, individuals form knowledge at different rates and in different ways. Each student, therefore, enters school with a different body of knowledge. The variety of primary languages, cultural practices, family structures, and life experiences that shape what students know and how they learn about the world contribute to the way students engage in learning. To ensure students can access the texts and build knowledge, high-quality English language arts curricula, like Wit & Wisdom®, should provide a wide base of support to all learners, engaging students in a collaborative topic of study that helps them make meaning through the texts they read and the tasks they complete.
The writers of Wit & Wisdom carefully selected texts that would build students’ knowledge of a topic over time. The texts are sequenced throughout a module in a way that supports students comprehending new ideas, acquiring new vocabulary, and asking strong questions that help them add to their knowledge of the world.
For example, at the end of Grade 2, students study how food nourishes their body. We can assume that some students might begin this module knowing a lot about this topic. Some students might have had a conversation with a nutritionist, grown a vegetable garden, or visited the local farmers’ market regularly. A student with Type 1 diabetes may have learned a lot about which foods are best for energy, while another who lives on a farm may have in-depth knowledge of how food is produced. Other students may lack these kinds of experiences that would prepare them for the extended study of food and digestion. Yet all students will need to increase their knowledge of food and nutrition to be successful with their End-of-Module Task:
Good Enough to Eat – “© 1999 Lizzy Rockwell”
Although the two texts students rely on for evidence in their End-of-Module Task are information dense, language rich, and require background knowledge about food and nutrition, the way the text sets are organized in the module helps students develop their ability to access these texts.
| Core Texts | How do these texts build students’ knowledge in the module? |
The Digestive System – “© 2008 Scholastic, Inc.” and “© Teacher Created Materials, Inc.” |
Students start by learning the basics of digestion with their first two informational texts, learning how food moves through the body and provides it with energy. Through these texts, students acquire academic vocabulary and extended practice with using text features to guide them in reading informational texts. Students build useful content-specific vocabulary such as digest, starches, and stomach that they will use throughout the module. |
Bone Button Borscht – “© 1996 Aubrey Davis and Duyan Petricic” Stone Soup – “© 1974 Marcia Brown” |
Then students read literary texts that explore how food can bring people together and nourish a community while they also practice opinion writing for the first time. Students build useful academic vocabulary such as cooperate, benefit, and community. |
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The Vegetables We Eat – “© 2007 Gail Gibbons” |
Students learn about different types of vegetables and how they are grown, processed, and moved to grocery stores and farm stands. Students learn content vocabulary such as root, tuber, and harvested. |
| Students learn more about how they can choose nourishing foods by reading about how different foods nourish their bodies. Students continue to build useful vocabulary with words such as nutrients, vitamin, and mineral. |
These texts all contribute to the module’s knowledge puzzle. Wit & Wisdom teachers think of the module’s knowledge puzzle as the larger body of knowledge students will be able to reflect on and demonstrate through their work in the module. Each text contributes a piece to the larger puzzle, helping students craft a clear response to the Essential Question and their End-of-Module Task to culminate their course of study.
As you prepare for module instruction, read both the core and supplementary text sets to better understand how students build knowledge and vocabulary through the texts they read. Looking for this “gold” in the text will help you prepare for making instructional decisions that support students with building the most critical knowledge throughout the module!
Students build knowledge through their repeated reading of texts. In Wit & Wisdom, texts are at the center of the instruction, and students are taught how to analyze and interpret the meaning of those texts through five Content Stages: Wonder, Organize, Reveal, Distill, and Know. If you’re a Wit & Wisdom teacher, you’re already intimately familiar with these five stages, as they organize the lessons in a module.
Learn more from Natalie Wexler in Episode 10 of the podcast, Melissa and Lori Love Literacy: "Noticing the #KnowledgeGap."
It’s important not only that students move through all five Content Stages with a text but also that they know how to interact with the text during each stage. In Wit & Wisdom, students interact with texts by routinely using the same four Core Practices, described below, to help them analyze and interpret texts. The Core Practices are critical for engaging in multiple readings of a text as students learn how to make meaning with the knowledge they build throughout the module.
The Core Practices put the texts at the center of learning but also ensure that students develop critical literacy skills that are transferrable across all texts. Building students’ capacity to use these Core Practices ensures that they have the tools they need to persist with complex texts and build knowledge at the same time.
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Core Practice Description |
Examples from Wit & Wisdom |
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Questioning Students monitor their understanding of the text by recording questions they have about it. |
In Grade 1 Module 3 Lesson 2, students generate questions they have about their first core text, Feel the Wind by Arthur Dorros. Students use a Question Cube to help them select a question word to start their question. Working with a partner, students orally generate as many questions as possible and then select one question they most want to answer and write that question on a sticky note. |
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Annotating While independently reading a text or section of text, students make notes with common annotation symbols and/or marginal notes. |
In Grade 3 Module 2 Lesson 16, students reread their core text, Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 by Brian Floca, in a small group. As students read, they use sticky notes to identify pages that help them understand the different points of view of different people who worked on the Apollo 11 mission. Students are guided to consider three questions as they reread the text:
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Summarizing Students summarize texts or sections of longer texts and reflect as they summarize to determine the main topic or central idea in what they are reading. |
In Grade 5 Module 1 Lesson 19, students complete a Story Map to summarize the key elements of two chapters in their core text, Thunder Rolling in the Mountains by Scott Odell. With the longer works featured in the upper grades, students frequently pause to summarize portions of the text to ensure that they understand what’s happening as they read. |
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Collecting Evidence The purposeful collecting of evidence serves as the bridge from reading to writing. Students collect evidence during reading when they question and annotate. The Core Practice formalizes the process, pinpointing the period when students collect evidence in response to a specific prompt, task, or question. |
In Grade 7 Module 2 Lesson 9, students collect evidence from chapters 7 and 8 of their core text, Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac, to show how the author develops the central idea that specific elements of Ned’s Navajo identity make him both want to join the US Marines and be well qualified to serve as a marine. Groups of students collaborate and discuss their potential evidence and then record their evidence on individual graphic organizers. |
Some of these Core Practices are natural fits with a specific Content Stage; for example, students always engage in Questioning during the Wonder stage. Annotation, however, is a Core Practice students use across all Content Stages to help them understand what the text actually says. To learn more about the Core Practices, read the descriptions in the Wit & Wisdom Implementation Guide, a free resource for educators.
Wit & Wisdom puts texts at the center of instruction so that students can engage with them authentically, asking their own questions to develop a body of foundational knowledge. Texts are sequenced to build knowledge over time, ensuring that every child acquires the vocabulary, content, and skills that will help them become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers. When equipped with a rich set of texts and the tools to drive inquiry, students can transfer the knowledge and skills they acquire to new settings—in school and beyond.