Common Core Standards for Elementary Grades K-2 Math & English Language Arts

A Quick-Start Guide

Amber Evenson, Monette McIver, Susan Ryan, Amitra Schwols, John Kendall

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781416614654
• eBook ISBN: 9781416615644
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Smart implementation of the Common Core State Standards requires both an overall understanding of the standards and a grasp of their implications for planning, teaching, and learning. This Quick-Start Guide provides a succinct, all-in-one look at

* The content, structure, terminology, and emphases of the Common Core standards for mathematics and English language arts and literacy in the lower elementary grades.
* The meaning of the individual standards within each of the four ELA/literacy strands and five math domains, with an emphasis on areas that represent the most significant changes to business as usual.
* How the standards connect across and within strands, domains, and grade levels to develop the foundational language arts, literacy, and mathematics understanding that will support a lifetime of successful learning.

Here, teachers of grades K-2 and elementary school leaders will find information they need to begin adapting their practices to help all students master the new and challenging material contained in the standards. A practical lesson planning process to use with the Common Core, based on Classroom Instruction That Works, 2nd Ed., is included, along with six sample lessons.

LEARN THE ESSENTIALS OF THE COMMON CORE

The grade-level and subject-specific Quick-Start Guides in the Understanding the Common Core Standards series, edited by John Kendall, are designed to help school leaders and school staffs turn Common Core standards into coherent, content-rich curriculum and effective, classroom-level lessons.

---

Part I

---

English Language Arts and Literacy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

---

Chapter 1

---

About the Common Core ELA/Literacy Standards for Grades K–2

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This chapter focuses on key areas of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy that represent the most significant changes to commonly used curricula and presents an overview of how the standards are organized, fit together, and reinforce one another. Reviewing the essential student knowledge and skills in the Common Core will allow teachers to quickly understand how they might adjust the materials and strategies used in their classroom to best meet these new expectations.

Focus Areas and Instructional Implications

Although the Common Core ELA/literacy standards are comprehensive and address a broad range of communication skills, in grades K–2, they place particular emphasis on three key areas: foundational skills for early reading, building disciplinary knowledge through complex informational texts, and writing and speaking about texts. Let's take a closer look at each area and consider its implications for teachers.

Foundational skills for early reading

The Common Core provides detailed guidance on the specific early reading knowledge and skills that children should attain when learning to decode texts and build reading fluency. Much of this knowledge and many of these skills, such as print concepts, phonological awareness, and phonetic knowledge, have also been recommended in key reports by the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). The standards call for foundational reading skills to be central to curriculum and instruction and to be systematically integrated into a wide spectrum of student language activities (Coleman & Pimental, 2012). The foundational skills standards do not represent a significant change from former state standards or common early reading curricula. However, teachers of young children will note that these standards provide very specific guidance in the skills that students need to acquire in order to read proficiently by 3rd grade, and so some curricular and instructional adjustments may be required.

Building knowledge through complex informational text

During the last decade, the amount of nonfiction included in reading textbooks and on national reading tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been increasing (National Assessment Governing Board, 2010). The Common Core adds momentum to this trend, calling for a balance between literature and informational texts in the curriculum.

Considering that as little as 7 percent of current elementary school instructional reading is expository (CCSSI, 2010d), adoption of the Common Core means elementary teachers will need to increase the number of informational texts they ask their students to read. Rather than compete with literary reading for "ELA class time," this reading should support learning across the curriculum, helping to build literacy and content-area knowledge in science, social studies, the arts, and other subjects. Additionally, it's essential that students' reading abilities not limit their acquisition of knowledge in areas like history and science; instruction should be designed to allow students to listen to complex informational texts that they may not be able to read on their own yet. This focus on using literacy skills to support subject-area learning is found throughout the Common Core standards, which also emphasize subject-specific vocabulary and writing about informational texts.

Writing and speaking about texts

The Common Core standards emphasize writing and speaking in response to stories and informational texts, including the comparison of ideas in texts on the same topic or theme. Students write pieces in which they support an opinion about a text and pieces in which they explain information from a text. In both cases, students provide supporting details in their writing and speaking that are drawn directly from the material they read and that has been read to them.

Teachers may support students' reading and writing about texts by increasing the number of text-based questions that they ask (Coleman & Pimentel, 2012). Text-based questions are those that can be answered only by referring to details in the text. Currently, many questions in the curriculum are designed to develop background knowledge or to help students make connections between the text and their personal experiences. These types of questions will remain important during prereading exercises and as support strategies, but Appendix A to the ELA/literacy standards document recommends that the bulk of questions teachers use during instruction be answerable only by examining the text. Additionally, the writers of the Common Core advise teachers to favor graphic organizers and activities that ask students to provide specific quotations from the text as evidence. As teachers begin to implement the Common Core standards, they should inventory and review their current curriculum to identify and modify the types of questions they typically use. Teachers who implement the Common Core standards will likely also need to increase the number of student writing activities based on texts that students read or listen to, decreasing their use of writing activities in which students respond to a prompt that draws only on prior knowledge or experiences.

How the Standards Are Organized

The Common Core English language arts and literacy standards present content within a highly organized structure. Content is organized first by strands and then grouped under more specific headings. The standards themselves provide the most detailed level of content description: statements of student knowledge and skills for particular grades. In elementary school, there are ELA/literacy standards for each grade, K–5. In addition, each grade-level set of content standards (with the exception of a subset of the reading standards) can be traced back to the set of College and Career Readiness Anchor (CCRA) standards that broadly describe what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate high school.

To further clarify the structure of the Common Core standards, we will look at each organizational component in turn.

Strands

The ELA/literacy standards are sorted into four strands: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. The first three of these categories will be familiar, as they have been used to organize content in numerous state ELA standards documents. The category of Language, however, was found less frequently in state standards. The Common Core Language strand describes knowledge and skills that cross all the strands. Grammar, for example, is applicable to both writing and speaking activities, and vocabulary is an important element of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The strands in the Common Core are also distinguished from some state standards in that research skills and media literacy are not separate categories; research is addressed in the Common Core Writing strand, and media is embedded throughout all strands, although it is most emphasized in the Speaking and Listening strand.

The Reading strand is further divided into three subsections, known as domains: Reading Literature, Reading Informational Text, and Reading Foundational Skills. The standards in the first two domains are parallel, addressing the same basic reading skills but describing them in ways specific to reading fiction versus reading nonfiction. The Foundational Skills domain addresses content related to early reading, including phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency. In this guide, we examine the similar Reading Literature and Reading Informational Text domains together in Chapter 2 and devote Chapter 3 to Reading Foundational Skills.

Each strand has an associated abbreviation code to identify its particular numbered standards, with each of the three domains of the Reading strand receiving its own shorthand:

• Reading Literature (RL)
• Reading Informational Text (RI)
• Reading Foundational Skills (RF)
• Writing (W)
• Speaking and Listening (SL)
• Language (L)

These strand abbreviations are used as part of the CCSSI's official identification system, which provides a unique identifier for each standard in the Common Core and can be very useful to school staffs developing crosswalks, planning lessons, and sharing lesson plans. For example, the fifth standard in the Writing strand can be referred to as "Writing Standard 5" or, using the full, formal "dot notation," as "CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5." To speak specifically of a standard for a particular grade, the grade designation is inserted between the strand and standard number: "CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.1.5," for example, is Writing Standard 5 for 1st grade. In this guide, we use an abbreviated form of this identification system, dropping the common prefix and using only the strand and standard number (e.g., W.5) in our general discussion. We have included the grade-level indicators in figures that present or refer to standards at various grade levels and in the sample lessons.

Headings

Within each strand, a set of two or more topic headings provides further organization. The same headings span all grade levels. In the Language strand, for example, the standards are organized under three headings: Conventions of Standard English, Knowledge of Language, and Vocabulary Acquisition and Use. The headings provide users with an overview of the topics that the particular strands address, group standards that share a similar focus, and provide context for understanding individual standards. For example, the Craft and Structure heading within the Reading strand signals that the standards beneath it will focus on the various choices that authors make when developing (crafting) and organizing (structuring) their writing.

College and Career Readiness Anchor standards

As noted, the College and Career Readiness Anchor standards define the knowledge and skills students should acquire in each content strand over the course of their K–12 education. The more specific, grade-level content standard statements spell out the aspects of CCRA knowledge and skills appropriate for students within that grade. In other words, there is a version of every anchor standard for each grade level, and every grade level has the same anchor standards. For illustration, see Figure 1.1, which displays the kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade versions of the same anchor standard within the Reading strand's Reading Literature domain. Note that in contrast to the rest of the Common Core standards for ELA/literacy, standards within the Reading strand's Foundational Skills domain are not directly associated with anchor standards.

---

Figure 1.1 | Lower Elementary Grade-Specific Versions of a CCRA Standard

CCRA
RL.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Kindergarten
RL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

Grade 1
RL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

Grade 2
RL.2.3 Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.

---

The use of anchor standards provides overarching goals for student learning. When a single content standard includes many details and various aspects, teachers can identify that standard's primary focus by referring to its associated anchor standard. The progression of grade-level standards provides a structure that indicates how students' skills are expected to advance over time. As teachers assess their students, the continuum of grade-level standards in the Common Core may enhance their understanding of how specific skills develop. Additional resources have also been developed to help teachers understand the precursor and postcursor skills for the Common Core standards at specific grade levels. The National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment has identified research-based learning progressions for use with the Common Core (Hess, 2011), and the Center on Instruction at RMC Research Corporation has identified learning progressions for the standards within the Reading Foundational Skills domain (Kosanovich & Verhagen, 2012).

Con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: English Language Arts and Literacy
• Part II: Mathematics
• Part III: Lesson Planning and Sample Lesson Plans
• References
• About the Authors
• About McREL
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright