Effective Curriculum for Teachers and Students

The Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® program has generated a range of materials that teachers with varying curriculum needs will find useful. These include:

• Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading, Integrated Science and Literacy Curriculum
• Literacy Investigations, Reading Instruction with an emphasis on content-rich texts in various genres
• Student books used in both series, available individually or in sets and with available strategy guides

Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading
Integrated Science and Literacy Curriculum

Teaching all four Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading science and literacy units at a grade-level can provide a substantive science program as well as the much needed content-rich literacy instruction which is underrepresented in many literacy programs—with a special focus on reading and writing informational and nonfiction text genres.

The chart below lists all units in the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading integrated science and literacy series currently available or under development:

Three guiding principles are applied in the development of each Seeds/Roots unit:

1. Engage students in firsthand and secondhand investigations to make sense of the natural world.

2. Employ multiple learning modalities–give students opportunities to "Do-it, Talk-it, Read-it, Write-it" as they progress through each Seeds/Roots unit.

3. Capitalize on science/literacy synergies: As scientists inquire so do readers seek meaning in text; as a reader infers meaning from text, so do scientists infer based on evidence they observe.

All of these concepts are described more fully, along with descriptions of the components of a typical unit (teacher guides, assessment materials, student books, student notebooks, and materials kits) in the program overview. Using the links in the column on the right side of this page you can access summaries of the content of each unit.

The teacher's guides for these units feature an innovative design that displays the information teachers need in a thoughtful way, making the information accessible in the context needed. Left-hand pages detail steps to follow in presenting sessions. Right-hand pages provide teaching support and considerations for the facing page. Assessments, materials, standards, special considerations, and more are all presented in a useable format, as shown on these sample pages (PDF download).

Embedded in all of the Seeds/Roots materials are a number of strategies for working with ELL students.

Literacy Investigations
A Reading Curriculum focused on Informational Text

Literacy Investigations is a reading-only curriculum that uses a subset of the books from each of the grade bands in the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading integrated science and literacy units. As students read thematically related science books they gain literacy skills in an organized knowledge domain that provides a natural context and purpose for authentic reading and writing, skills that will be essential as they move on to higher grades and begin to read to learn. Literacy Investigations is scheduled to be released after the grades 2–5 integrated Seeds/Roots series is completed.

Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading Student Books
And Related Strategy Guides

The science books featured in Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading were all written specifically for the integrated science and literacy program. However, because of the quality of the books and the extensive information they contain, many teachers purchase the books separately to share with their students. For those teachers, we have a series of strategy guides that outline how to use the books without using them as part of a larger curriculum, and still get the benefit of having students learn much more than just the content presented in the books. This resource may be the only science material in many class rooms.

Other curriculum links:

• Overviews of integrated units with content summaries for Grades 2/3, Grades 3/4, and Grades 4/5.
• Student book descriptions for Grades 2/3, 3/4, and 4/5 (coming).
• Strategy Guides for Student Books.
  
• Literacy Investigations program description.
• Correlations to Standards
• The assessment
  items databank.

• Cognates in Seeds/Roots.
• Text features in Seeds/Roots.
• Using multiple meaning words.
• Using anticipation guides in Seeds/Roots.
• 50 key science words.