Louisiana ELA Guidebooks 2022
Louisiana ELA Guidebooks 2022 (Grades 3-5) is an English language arts curriculum for core instruction made by Louisiana teachers and available for free. In each unit, lessons and unit overviews provide teachers with clear guidance, flexibility, and lots of student supports. The curriculum offers some choice among units to teachers and/or districts and, at the lesson level, a suite of additional optional activities that teachers can use to accelerate students’ learning. Each ELA Guidebook unit features carefully curated texts that explore compelling questions and tackle big ideas. Texts are authentic and complex, exposing students to layers of meaning and diverse perspectives appropriate for the grade level. And thanks to a close partnership with The Writing Revolution, students receive robust instruction in the art and science of writing about the texts under study.
Rich, rigorous, diverse texts:
How Louisiana ELA Guidebooks 2022 designs for:
Deep knowledge-building
Each lesson targets specific knowledge-building. The ELA Guidebooks build students’ understanding and knowledge through carefully curated text sets, compelling questions, and integrated reading and writing activities. The ELA Guidebooks emphasize reading a volume of texts on conceptually related topics to quickly build student knowledge and vocabulary. Students complete a unit-specific tool or “Rolling Knowledge Journal” after reading and annotating each text, which allows them to collect new learning about the topic and capture connections that add to their existing knowledge base. Vocabulary is explicitly taught throughout the unit, with students shown how to attend to diverse context clues, build dictionaries, and complete vocabulary logs. Writing is another hallmark of the ELA Guidebooks: it is baked into every lesson of every unit.
Systematic foundational skills and fluency
Though the ELA Guidebooks begin in grade 3 and, therefore, do not contain an early reading program, they include selected, vital foundational skills supports. Fluency with grade-level complex text is evident in every lesson, and additional student supports are included. Additionally, all students are instructed in reading multisyllabic words. The superb sentence-level focus in The Writing Revolution writing activities boosts students’ ability to read and understand increasingly complex syntax—a frequent source of challenge in upper elementary grades. Though not directly built in, the Guidebooks offer a variety of resources, linked to in the materials, for supporting students who need additional foundational skills practice in upper elementary grades.
Equitable access to challenging texts
Each unit is packed full of close reading routines and scaffolded templates to support students’ text annotations, vocabulary development, writing skills, and peer interactions. All students actively participate in class discussions with accountability processes embedded, which are a fixture in every lesson. Materials attend to both what students say and how they say it. Throughout each unit, students engage in a variety of oral and written activities to support them in expressing their understanding of the texts. Daily lesson “look fors” and regular diagnostics allow teachers to monitor each student’s progress and provide extra supports as needed. 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
Learning and exhibiting deep knowledge
Access Louisiana ELA Guidebooks 2022
Louisiana ELA Guidebooks 2022 (Grades 3-5) is available exclusively on Louisiana’s open-source digital platform, Louisiana Curriculum Hub.