Literacy
We are excited to support you and your child with gaining meaningful literacy experiences inside and outside of school.
We hope that these resources will provide your family with valuable information about what your child is learning in school as well as good books to read and exciting things to do around the city of Madison that will support your children’s literacy development.
Learning to read for understanding requires sounding out and recognizing words—decoding—but it also requires making meaning of the words and sentences we hear—language comprehension. Research in the Science of Reading is clear about what matters to teach in early literacy instruction: phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, fluency, vocabulary and oral language comprehension, and text comprehension.
MMSD recently adopted new high-quality, joyful, engaging K-5 curriculum in which students can see themselves and their lived experiences reflected in the rich texts, they include:
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Benchmark Curricular materials support teaching in our Dual Language Immersion and Developmental Bilingual Education programs in English (Benchmark Advanced) and Spanish (Benchmark Adelante).
COMING SOON - Grade Level Learning and Family Resources
- EL Curriculum is a comprehensive, standards-based core literacy curriculum that engages teachers and students through complex, culturally affirming, real-world content and builds equitable learning opportunities for all students.
“This rigorous curriculum integrates the experiences of our diverse communities in meaningful and innovative ways. We are excited about this unprecedented level of investment in curriculum for our school district - the largest commitment to literacy in over a decade - and for its potential to pay tremendous dividends for our future generations of scholars.”
— Cynthia Green, MMSD Associate Superintendent for Teaching and Learning
What is the Science of Reading?
The science of reading is the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction, organized around models that describe how and why. An important model in early reading research that Reading Comprehension (RC) is the product of Decoding (D) and Language Comprehension (LC), or RC = D x LC.
Early Literacy and Beyond Task Force
MMSD and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education formed a joint task force focused on analyzing the most promising approaches to teaching reading and utilizing literacy — at every level — as an equity strategy to ensure all MMSD students receive high-quality, grade level accelerated instruction.
A return to phonics
by Jenny Peek
The science of reading has finally returned to Madison public schools after years of parents, teachers and advocates calling on the district to change its approach to literacy.