Amplify ELA (6-8)
The middle school curriculum is designed to spark students’ curiosity about themselves and the world around them. The challenging, authentic texts and topics are carefully chosen to validate students’ diverse identities and support their social-emotional growth. Lessons incorporate technology seamlessly, including audio/visual resources such as author interviews, dramatic readings, and spoken testimonies—all designed to enhance the learning experience. Writing assignments vary in purpose, audience, genre, and length and are an essential part of the curriculum, occurring almost daily. A “100-lesson option,” which covers all standards while allowing teachers and students to fold in favorite texts or spend extra time in units, provides significant implementation flexibility.
Rich, rigorous, diverse texts:
How Amplify ELA designs for:
Deep knowledge building
Unit introductions outline the literary, scientific, or historical knowledge that students will explore. Students engage with sets of closely connected literary and informational texts offering a breadth of perspectives and experiences. Units emphasize self-reflection, group discussion, and writing activities related to these texts. Students examine high-value words using an innovative app that extracts vocabulary from each core text, allowing them to work at their own pace. Each grade includes one or two units based on primary sources and research. Periodic “quests,” which feature collaborative problem solving, role playing, case studies, and artifact examination, vary classroom routines by asking students to take the lead. The Amplify Library boasts over 700 classic and contemporary full-length texts of varying complexity levels to support and extend work with the core texts.
Foundational skills and fluency for beginning and older readers
In Amplify ELA 6-8, lessons, Flex Days, differentiation, and student-facing scaffolds work together to support students as they are securing their foundational skills.
Work with text-based vocabulary is integrated into daily reading and writing. Students begin class with the Amplify Vocabulary App, which focuses on a critical subset of words with self-paced, game-like activities based on morphology, analogy, synonyms/antonyms, and deciphering meanings in context. The app adjusts content based on students’ performance on each activity, moving students among at-grade, below-grade, and above-grade-level words and providing support within core lessons. The curriculum also includes routines for practice with critical unit vocabulary: specifically, pronunciation and syllabification, word origin, and morphemes. Vocabulary Modules offer explicit instruction around Greek and Latin roots, connotation and denotation, and prefixes and suffixes.
The program includes student-facing supports such as 1) audio to accompany each reading activity, 2) a “reveal word” tool within each core text that offers short, contextual definitions for key vocabulary, and 3) multi-language glossaries in 11 languages with critical vocabulary for each unit.
To enhance reading fluency, students can access multimodal fluent readings of new texts and regularly perform fluent presentations of dialogue, dramatic scenes, or poems they are studying. Additionally, Flex Days—occurring about every fifth day of instruction—target areas needing improvement in reading, writing, and language skills, as identified by Amplify’s embedded measurement system. Flex Day activities include focused fluency practice (both rate and expression) with partners using key lesson passages.
Equitable access to challenging texts
Lessons seamlessly integrate reading, writing, discussion, and language to keep students engaged. Students interact with texts through annotations, embedded read-alouds, text-specific questions, evidence-based discussions, and formal debates. The curriculum is designed to meet the needs of English learners. Students write regularly, work with vocabulary daily, and make connections within or across texts to deepen their understanding. Teachers digitally monitor students’ progress, allowing them to adjust instruction as lessons proceed. Regularly scheduled Flex Days reinforce student learning. Each unit concludes with a curriculum-embedded assignment: performing scenes from a text, crafting speeches or poems, creating multimedia presentations, or writing reflective essays and evidence-based texts.
