Scope & Sequence

You’ll start with the fundamentals just like a coach has his team work on drills to practice dribbling, passing, and shooting. The first foldout in the Playbook is Reader Voices. Introducing students to their Reading Voice and Thinking Voice sets the stage for yearlong comprehension instruction on how to think, infer, and tackle any text.

Yes! You can begin using your Comprehension Playbook during any part of your school year. No matter when you start, always begin by introducing your students to their reader voices–a fundamental for every comprehension lesson.

 

A round is a “week.” One panel in the printed play provides one round of lesson ideas. It represents a week of direct, whole-class instruction. It is not a perfect 5-day week. Some skills may only need 4 days. While other skills may require up to 7. So a round is a “week” or somewhere between 4-7 days.

You could teach all rounds consecutively, but that’s not the intent of The Playbook. Consider developmental readiness as it applies to instruction. By spiraling back to a skill, you can review and then layer their understanding of that skill. This approach also benefits students who move in later in the year, allowing them to still learn the reading skills they need. The suggested order for the rounds is included in your grade-level Comprehension Road Map. A Road Map video is included on the digital resources to explain the rationale behind the order.

Each Playbook is a unique combination of yearlong comprehension skills to teach–called plays. A grade-level road map is included, highlighting the suggested order to spiral through instruction.

Every Comprehension Playbook comes with its own suggested scope and sequence–a road map. But if your school already has a scope and sequence, use the Index of Skills to locate the Playbook lessons and teach them in the required order.

 

You could, but the Playbook starts with fundamentals for a reason. The first four weeks of whole-class instruction allows you to introduce your students to the Reading Voice and the Thinking Voice. During those weeks, you’ll explain and model how to use reader voices in a variety of texts for a variety of thoughts. And–students will have the opportunity to practice those skills/fundamentals and be prepared to use them for the rest of the year.

To honor high-ability students, consider three different options. First, when using the text considerations listed in the Playbook, raise the rigor through level of difficulty or mode of delivery. A second thought involves the days included in each round. While making sure to touch all standards, you could move through the rounds faster by condensing and consolidating instructional points into fewer days. And a third option could take the Road Map and condense some instruction (Summarize Lit and Info) while extending more challenging instruction (Author Choices, Compare Texts, Synthesize Ideas).

The instruction and resources included in the Literacy eLessons were created to stem the tide during March of 2020 when schools were shutting down and teachers and students were all asked to do school remotely. Since it was spring, the lessons were made with the assumption that all of the skills had been rolled out earlier in the year. The lessons were a way to keep the fires burning–reminding students of skills and encouraging them to practice while schooling at home. The pace of the lessons does not match the Playbook. However, the lessons can be viewed as model lessons for teachers to learn best-practice strategies. And, when appropriate, can still be shared directly with students.