Benchmark ELA curriculum
Benchmark Advance and Benchmark Adelante ©2018 are brand-new, comprehensive English and Spanish Reading/Language Arts programs from Benchmark Education Company for Kindergarten through sixth grade. These programs are built to address key shifts in curriculum and instruction to meet the demands of the new standards.
Rigorous, integrated reading, writing, speaking, and listening instruction meets the needs of districts implementing a reading collaborative, balanced approach, or workshop model, and enables all students to master rigorous learning goals with strong resources for differentiated instruction and responsive teaching based upon ongoing assessments.
A forward-thinking approach to English Learner instruction provides unique tools designed to scaffold students to on-level materials, which are complex, high-quality texts built for today's learner.
Vertical Alignment
A Cohesive Framework
The architecture of Benchmark Advance and Benchmark Adelante provides a framework that develops students content knowledge over time. All ELA, SLA, and ELL instruction occurs in the context of 10 content-focused knowledge strands that increase in complexity and build knowledge over time, within a grade level and also across grades K-6.
Engaging Texts That Build Knowledge
Every topic is a unit. Every unit consists of three weeks of instruction. This framework provides ample time for students to be immersed in the topic, exapanding their academic knowledge and vocabulary as they build literacy and language skills.
Students are provided wide, deep, and meaningful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that build knowledge. Whole-group instruction focuses on core, grade-level texts. Small-group instruction provides a wealth of leveled texts at a variety of levels and reader's theater to support differentiation. All texts are connected to the unit topic.
As students move to the next grade level, they will revisit these strands through the lens of the unit topic and an Essential Question that builds from prior years of instruction, supports grade-level standards and expectations, and promotes thinking about a topic or concept from many perspectives simultaneously.