Our curriculum
Evidence-based curriculum
Our curriculum provides targeted instruction and practice of foundational literacy skills students need to move towards grade-level reading proficiency and is designed to be easily administered by volunteers. Reading Partners’ curriculum is aligned to the Common Core State Standards, other state standards, and the science of reading to promote student mastery and augment classroom instruction.
The power of individualized attention
Reading Partners recognizes the challenges classroom teachers face in meeting a wide variety of student needs. Our model:
- Provides each student with a caring coach to deliver targeted support and champion success
- Gives each student the opportunity to work at their own pace and at just the right level
- Offers personalized vocabulary support; a tutor can stop and discuss words and topics unfamiliar to their student as needed
- Allows for student choice with the guidance of a trained adult
Targeted lessons for success
The Reading Partners curriculum is comprised of more than 150 lessons. Each lesson is easy to follow and requires no preparation outside of the reading center. Reading Partners’ team members offer ongoing coaching and support to tutors as questions arise.
The right starting place for every student
Reading Partners’ students are assessed at enrollment and placed at an appropriate starting place in the curriculum sequence, where they practice key reading comprehension skills and develop their vocabularies.
- Emerging readers learn about letters, sounds in spoken language, and how print works
- Beginning readers learn phonics principles and high-frequency words
- Advancing readers work on their accuracy, fluency, and comprehension
Lessons cover multiple reading skills
- Each lesson begins with the tutor reading aloud to the student from a book the child has selected. The tutor asks questions and discusses the book’s content and vocabulary with the student.
- The tutor introduces a new skill or concept and helps the student complete an introductory task.
- The tutor supports the student while they read and encourages the student to apply the new skill and/or concept.
Supporting success beyond the reading center
Reading Partners’ lessons are built around carefully selected books. Books are chosen to fit the skills being taught and match the students’ reading levels. To represent the diversity of our student population, Reading Partners ensures that the curriculum includes texts featuring characters and stories from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. In 2023, we created our own set of decodable books called Cover to Cover that reflect the diverse populations of students we serve and align our curriculum with evidence-based research to help them build stronger literacy skills.
Reading Partners encourages reading at home. Since many families in the United States have few children’s books at home, we give students books to read at home and build their own libraries.