We are constantly striving to listen, learn, and adapt our curriculum to help teachers engage and meet the needs of every student. We are excited to share our latest additions to the Fishtank ELA curriculum across grades K–12. We hope that these updates will simplify your lesson prep, improve classroom instruction, and help you deepen students’ understanding of new content.
Elementary ELA Updates
This month, we adjusted the presentation of the course sequences for 1st through 5th grade ELA. Previously we designated two types of ELA units—literature and science & social studies—and offered up to 12 units for each course, ideally to be taught in a parallel structure. The reality is that most school days allow for just one ELA block, and we want to offer a balanced and coherent sequence of units to support teachers and students.
For each course, we have selected five or six units to comprise a recommended scope and sequence that balances literature and informational texts across a variety of genres. Teaching the units in this order ensures that the students engage with grade-level reading, writing, language, and speaking and listening standards in a coherent sequence that builds appropriately over the course of the school year.
The remaining units from each grade will still be available on the Fishtank website as alternates for certain units in the recommended sequence. If you would like to continue using the parallel sequence of literature and science & social studies units, you can use this guide to the former sequence.
Across all of our elementary courses, we are continuing to add more writing projects that engage students’ creativity and the knowledge they’ve built across the curriculum. Additionally, on all elementary unit pages, we now include the unit focus areas for reading, writing, and speaking & listening to help teachers more easily identify the goals of the unit. Below, you can see an example of the Focus Areas from the 4th grade unit Believing in Yourself: The Wild Book.
As part of the Enhanced Lesson Plans available to Fishtank Plus users, you will now see sample student responses to Key Questions that can help make your instruction more focused and effective. We are continuing to add these responses and plan to have them available for units by the time you teach them–if you are teaching the content in order. As a Fishtank Plus user, you will also see new Exit Tickets added under the Key Questions section of many lessons. These are meant to provide additional data points to inform your instruction and assess student understanding.
Below is a sample Exit Ticket from Lesson 6 of the 3rd grade Embracing Difference: The Hundred Dresses and Garvey’s Choice unit.
If you would like to see a list of updates by unit, including planned release dates, you can review our Fishtank ELA K-8 Updates document.
Middle and High School ELA Updates
In our middle school curriculum, we are continuing to assess our units and lessons to ensure that they are engaging, rigorous, and relevant for all students. As part of that process, we are adding additional writing projects that allow students to be creative, conduct research, and share their personal stories.
In the first unit of 6th grade, students are introduced to the paragraph writing process and given direct instruction on how to unpack a writing prompt in a newly added three-lesson writing project. Later in the unit, students work on identifying evidence, drafting, and revising their paragraphs in two more newly added writing lessons. Similar writing projects have been added in the first units of 7th and 8th grade.
Below is part of the lesson map for the 6th grade Developing Resilience: The Watsons Go to Birmingham unit that highlights three new writing lessons.
To help students get the most out of these writing projects, we are improving guidance for writing instruction within the Enhanced Lesson Plans for middle school. Teachers will see these changes reflected across the curriculum in updates we are making this summer and early fall.
We are particularly excited to share the many updates to our High School ELA curriculum! We have not only updated units but have a completely new unit to share in 9th grade and a set of High School ELA-specific Teacher Tools.
Since releasing the new 9th and 10th grade courses in the 2021-22 school year, the Fishtank team has been collecting feedback and working through revisions of those course materials to provide deeper, more aligned support for teachers and students, while also refining the text selections based on the feedback we received.
The first 3 units of the 9th grade course have updated Essential Questions, additional supplemental texts, and new lessons that prioritize writing and discussion. Throughout all of the units, students are addressing the questions below that relate to the overarching topic of personal identity.
- To what extent is our identity determined by us or shaped by those around us?
- How do society’s beliefs, values, and customs influence our own personal identity?
- How does literature from various voices, cultures, and experiences help us examine and celebrate our own identities?
- How does reading literature build our empathy so that we recognize the value and dignity of others’ identities?
With Fishtank Plus, you will also see Unit Launches, a vocabulary package, and revised Enhanced Lesson Plans within these and future new or updated high school units.
In addition to these updates, we also have a brand new unit in 9th grade. Based on teacher feedback, Unit 4, which previously centered around the core text Dominicana, will now feature Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies. The novel tells the story of the Mirabel sisters—Dedé, Minerva, María Teresa, and Patria—during the time of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. The novel follows the sisters from their childhood to their adulthood when they became the faces of the revolution.
To support high school teachers across grade levels, we have updated our ELA Teacher Tools to better reflect the needs of high school students. All teachers can now access our High School Vocabulary Protocol Teacher Tool that outlines the Explicit Vocabulary Instruction Protocol and strategies for implicitly teaching vocabulary in high school ELA, and our new Socratic Seminar Teacher Tool that offers resources and guidance for you and your students to prepare for, engage in, and reflect on a Socratic Seminar.
Fishtank Plus users unlock a third High School Teacher Tool: Engaging with the Target Task (9–12) that explores supports and instructional moves that can be used to support high school students before, during, and after engaging with the Target Task.
Upgrade to Fishtank Plus today to unlock all the Fishtank features you need to simplify lesson prep, easily manage your materials, and deeply engage your students. Stay up to date with all the latest Fishtank news and best practices for your classroom on the Fishtank Blog and by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Have ideas on how we can improve? Let us know.
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