ARC Core Fusion (6-8)
ARC Core Fusion (Grades 6-8) is an English language arts curriculum designed for core instruction that includes complex texts that challenge, engage, and inspire readers. Organized around four topic-based modules each year, students acquire science, social studies, and literary genre knowledge through daily reading of content-rich literature, discussion with their peers, independent research, and aligned writing tasks. Units center on a final writing task requiring students to synthesize and apply knowledge gained from the anchor texts in the unit and all include a related research library providing students ample opportunity for a volume of reading. In each unit, lessons and unit overviews provide teachers with high level guidance, a great amount of flexibility, and embedded supports for Multilingual Learners. ARC Core Fusion cultivates a culture of reading and writing in class and at home.
Rich, rigorous, diverse texts:
How ARC Core Fusion designs for:
Deep knowledge building
ARC Core Fusion’s modules authentically integrate reading literature or informational texts with writing tasks to provide students with a coherent, knowledge-rich study of history, social studies, science, and literary genres. The curriculum, through its research libraries, emphasizes reading a volume of texts on conceptually related topics to quickly build student knowledge and vocabulary. In addition to whole class reading, students are able to select texts from the topically connected research library to engage in further study.
Students engage in daily academic discourse with peers using responses to text-specific questions and justification of ideas with evidence from the text, fostering deep comprehension and collaborative knowledge building. Culminating assignments focus on the essential takeaways from class readings and student research, using teacher and peer feedback to build students’ confidence, capacity, and skills. At each module’s conclusion, students present their research to showcase their expertise in the content and writing mode of the unit, all while developing essential communication and presentation skills.
Foundational skills and fluency for beginning and older readers
Though ARC Core Fusion is designed for grades 6-8, and therefore, does not contain an early reading program, it does include selected foundational skills supports. Fluency is supported through volume of reading. Units provide students with opportunities to engage in repeated readings of core texts and students are encouraged to read and reread a wide range of texts from each unit’s topically connected supplemental library. Though not directly built in, a supplemental program, ARC Accelerator, offers a variety of resources to provide targeted instruction and practice for secondary students not yet reading on grade level.
Equitable access to challenging texts
Students regularly work with multiple high-quality, complex, grade level core texts that are thoughtfully curated and engaging for secondary students. Students are also able to select from a wide variety of topically connected supplemental texts from the unit’s research library which represent a range of complexity levels. Lessons include text dependent questions to promote exploration of complex texts and graphic organizers to help students capture and organize their thinking. Throughout each unit, students engage in a variety of oral and written activities to support them in expressing their understanding of the texts. Each unit concludes with a curriculum-embedded culminating task, which requires students to incorporate the knowledge, skills, and habits developed throughout the unit.
Topics of study
