PLC Charter Schools at Estrella Mountain is implementing a research-based reading program that provides a comprehensive approach in five areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

For our Kinder through 5th grades, we follow Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt's Into Reading (click below to connect to the program's website for an overview of the program!):

For our 6th through 8th grades, we use Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt's Collections for our ELA and Writing classes (click below to connect to the program's website for an overview of the program!):

Language Arts is a broad area which includes the following components:

• Phonics and Fluency - Understanding sounds through letter recognition, blending, and decoding is the foundation for rereading and reading, which leads to fluency. Fluency is the ability to sound out familiar and unfamiliar words in text while reading.
• Grammar and Conventions - Developing skills in spelling, punctuation, parts of speech, verb tenses and sentence types leads to better reading writing, listening and speaking.
• Reading Comprehension Strategies - Building critical thinking skills through pre-reading, reading comprehension, making inferences, asking questions, summarizing, comparing and contrasting, analyzing characters, and identifying cause and effect creates an understanding of literature.
• Vocabulary - Learning multiple meanings, synonyms, antonyms, prefixes, suffixes, parts of speech, and using context clues help students broaden their oral expression, writing, and speaking skills.
• Writing - Beginning with prewriting, applying the writing process, sentence and paragraph structure, sequencing, conventions, and various genres of composition, response, analysis and creative thinking structures students' writing

We also use the DIBEL program to assess student achievement and progress in Reading and Fluency through the mClass Assessments in Amplify:

To encourage and enrich our students' reading opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom, our students have access to Scholastic's Literacy Pro online library: