Build On ELA Reading Skills With Leveled Nonfiction Articles

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, ensuring that students progress seamlessly from one grade level to the next is a critical goal. This process, known as vertical articulation, is essential for building a strong foundation of skills and knowledge throughout a student’s academic journey. 

From the outside looking in, when observing departments and districts that do vertical articulation well, it can appear almost like magic. That’s because vertical articulation is a process that happens almost exclusively behind the scenes in schools and is difficult to see embedded within any one particular lesson at one particular grade level on one particular day. 

It’s the sort of work that, by definition, cannot be done alone. It requires an entire department to be rowing in the same direction, and through experience, I can attest that the work is fraught with many obstacles. That’s why schools need support to do the work well. Schools and educators need tools that are working as hard as they are behind the scenes.

Some of the most frequent challenges that schools face around vertical articulation are:

Wide Gaps in Student Skills

The students in any given classroom have a wide range of backgrounds, learning styles, and academic strengths and weaknesses. This diversity necessitates a flexible approach, and one that meets students where they’re at.

Producing and Administering Effective Assessments

Effective assessment is crucial for tracking student progress and ensuring that skills are developing vertically from one grade to the next. However, schools often struggle to create and implement assessments that align seamlessly across grade levels.

Time

Teachers and school leaders often lack the time required to implement comprehensive vertical articulation strategies. This includes time needed to effectively map pathways across grade levels, the time needed to develop quality assessments that will produce actionable data, the time needed to analyze assessment data, and the time needed to identify best instructional practices across grade levels. 

How The Juice Can Be Used As a Tool for Vertical Articulation 

The Juice produces daily content for classrooms that:

• consistently engages students in reading because students find the content relevant to their lives
• is written at four different reading levels to ensure it meets students where they’re at
• aligns with vertically articulated pathways for reading informational text across all 50 states
• can be used across subject areas 
• provides real-time feedback in the form of actionable data for teachers

In just 15 minutes, students can read about what’s happening in the world around them, while simultaneously providing teachers with quality data about their students’ ability to read grade-level appropriate informational text. And since The Daily Juice is delivered daily to a student’s inbox at 6:30 every morning, without devoting precious class time to the endeavor, teachers can collect actionable data on students’ reading skills. 

What Do You Get When You Have Students Reading The Juice On A Daily Basis?

Students become stronger readers. 

Research has shown the correlation between daily reading practice and improved literacy outcomes. By providing students with engaging content each day, students have purposeful reading practice with content that engages them. We have consistently heard from teachers who use The Juice that students are not only engaged in their reading, but they are building essential information literacy skills. 

Read one of our latest case studies to learn how this educator saw 1.5 years of reading growth over the summer in only 6 weeks

Empowered educators. 

Equipped with the performance data they need to effectively plan instruction and determine potential interventions, teachers can identify whole-class re-teaching opportunities, or individualized interventions as necessary. If an entire department is using The Juice, teachers will be able to spend professional collaboration time identifying trends together and developing targeted instructional materials that address areas for growth.

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