Here at Fishtank, we strive to improve our offerings and make the incredibly important—and challenging—work teachers do a little bit easier. This summer, we’ve rolled out new features, unit improvements, and tons of new content across our ELA courses. We hope these updates give you even more to love as you and your students five into our knowledge-building ELA units.
What’s New in Middle and High School ELA
We’ve been focused on both our middle and high school ELA offerings and are excited to share some of the major projects we’ve been working on. At the high school level, we have made the most significant changes to 10th Grade ELA. We have released three brand new units that help high school students explore the theme of the individual in society. The three new units center around the texts Antigone, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Reading Lolita in Tehran. The remaining two units for 10th Grade, centered around Fahrenheit 451 and Purple Hibiscus, were previously updated and released, ensuring that the entire sequence is aligned and designed to engage, challenge, and inspire high school students.
In our 6th-8th Grade ELA courses, we are completing a major round of revisions to improve Enhanced Lesson Plans, making them more effective, engaging, and easier to utilize in the classroom. The most significant change is that Enhanced Lesson Plans will now identify the highest priority teaching moments within a lesson, in alignment with lesson and unit goals. This includes Close Reading guidance for one high-priority Key Question built into the Enhanced Lesson Plan. Teachers will find embedded Close Reading strategies including Line-By-Line Read, Multi-Layer Read, Studying the Evidence, and Language Sensitivity Analysis, which can be used to help students unlock the complexity of a text.
Additionally, Vocabulary Assessments will be built out and offered separate from the Content Assessment to ensure teachers can achieve a more targeted evaluation of their students’ vocabulary development. Content Assessments will continue to assess students’ reading and understanding of unfamiliar passages with multiple choice questions and a longer written response.
In 7th Grade ELA, we’ve released a new version of Unit 1, Longing to Belong: Poems, Essays, and Short Stories. This first unit of the year still centers a variety of short texts to expose students to diverse voices and experiences as they explore the theme of belonging, but the chosen texts better reflect the level of engagement and rigor we wanted to offer teachers.
You can explore all of our updates in more detail in our Guide to Fishtank ELA Updates for 2024-2025.
What’s New in Elementary ELA
In our 5th Grade course, we have made a sequence change that ensures students are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives and experiences during the school year. While Friendship Across Boundaries: Return to Sender had previously been included in the alternate sequence, it is now listed as our recommended fifth and final unit of the year, replacing Belonging to a Movement: One Crazy Summer. While teachers still ultimately have the flexibility to decide which unit they want to use with students, we made this shift to reflect our goal of exposing students to diverse voices across units.
Across our elementary ELA courses, we have been working to respond to the challenges caused by out-of-print texts and are confident that we can now better support teachers by offering alternative texts where possible and guidance for skipping lessons when necessary. Additionally, we have made changes to the K-2 lesson handouts, available to Fishtank Plus users, making them more user-friendly from both teachers and students.
In the coming year, we will be continuing to review and revise our offerings to ensure they align with students’ needs, our mission and values, and the latest research-based best practices.
Stay up to date with the education trends teachers are talking about and see all the latest from Fishtank Learning on the Fishtank Blog. Ready to start exploring units yourself? Access thousands of knowledge-building, engaging lesson plans for free with your Fishtank Learning account.