Reading Saturday Curriculum

Reading Saturday Curriculum

The Reading Saturday curriculum focuses not only on letters, sounds, and words but on word recognition, phonics, comprehension, and other skills activities designed to improve a student’s reading ability.

The curriculum is implemented around a framework of three sessions each Saturday. All students, except those in first grade, receive instruction from a certified teacher for all three sessions, in classes limited to eight students.

First grade students spend one session with a trained volunteer before completing the final two sessions with their assigned instructor. The volunteers serve as mentors and friends, helping their assigned student read and respond to literature.

First & Second Grade Readers

For first and second grade students, teachers use:

1. essential questions that act as learning objectives,

2. language experience to encourage students to make connections between thought, speech, and written language,

3. basic sight vocabulary and comprehension exercises,

4. graphic organizers that provide a visual diagram of ideas and how they are related, and encourage students to connect new learning with prior knowledge,

5. directed reading thinking activities to help students predict story development and monitor understanding, and

6. read aloud sessions that model use of sentence structure and reading fluency while helping students develop good listening skills.

Third Grade Readers

The third grade curriculum emphasizes comprehension and fluency over basic phonics skills. Certified teachers employ the use of:

1. essential questions,

2. basic sight vocabulary and comprehension exercises,

3. graphic organizers,

4. exploration into idioms and figurative phrases,

5. poetry reading,

6. directed reading activities to help students form mental images, make predictions, and connect new ideas with prior knowledge,

7. silent reading,

8. one-to-one reading conferences focused on reading comprehension, and

9. cloze procedures to give students practice using context to derive meaning.

Fourth & Fifth Grade Readers

The fourth and fifth grade instruction plan places emphasis on reading and understanding fiction and non-fiction literature. Within this framework, students are taught to:

1. relate themes in works of fiction to personal experience,

2. make judgments and inferences about setting, characters and events and support them with evidence from the text,

3. understand and acquire new vocabulary and use it correctly in reading and writing, determining the meaning of unknown words by using context,

4. identify the meaning of common root words to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words,

5. identify the meaning of common prefixes, and

6. recognize and use words with multiple meanings and determine which meaning is intended from the context of the sentence.

The Reading Saturday curriculum was developed in consultation with a Kennesaw State University childhood education professor and a retired Director of Curriculum for Marietta City Schools.

"The structure of the Reading Saturday program provides the kind of nurturing environment where each child can experience success."

- Emily Lembeck, Superintendent, Marietta City Schools