Nine years ago, as a second-year teacher, I was surprised to discover that my 5th graders didn't know the 50 states and their capitals. I made it my personal goal to teach them about the states that make up their country. My colleague next door didn't share my concern. She wanted to ensure that her students knew the names and faces of every U.S. President.
Today I can't say there is anything wrong with the content we used to teach. The point is: it isn't fair to our students that some learn one thing while others learn something else. We must agree on some core of specific content and resolve to teach it at the appropriate levels.
Three years ago my school, Three Oaks Elementary in Fort Myers, Florida, began implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum. As an educator I've never been more excited about teaching than I have been since using this program. The Core Knowledge Sequence for Grades 1–6 provides a model of grade-by-grade content that all children can build upon year by year. This content includes literature, American and world civilization, science and technology, fine arts, and mathematics.
In the beginning we formed a committee of teachers and administrators to discuss how we could integrate Core Knowledge into our curriculum. We met through the 1990 spring semester and the following summer. Even for our young staff, change wasn't easy: many of us were already comfortable with the teacher's editions and the units we had taught in the past. But as we delved into Core Knowledge, we realized that the content proposed was the “good stuff” that we all ought to be teaching.
In our many meetings, the committee began putting the specific content into monthly theme-based units. After much discussion—and several confessions of our own ignorance about some of the topics—we came up with a scope-and-sequence centered around schoolwide themes that we all could live with. With this rough plan in hand, the committee members called meetings with their grade levels and worked out any remaining kinks.
That summer teachers went to work developing new units for nearly every month of the year. If we hadn't shared the work, it would have overwhelmed us. Still, there were times when many of us wondered, “Why are we killing ourselves over this anyway?”
Then school began, and our questions were answered as our children's enthusiasm for learning skyrocketed. That first September the 3rd grade team taught a unit on Native Americans. Though I had nearly always taught about Native Americans, I now had specific content to cover: beliefs, culture, daily life, and locations of nations in the Iroquois Confederacy.
The teachers on my team had chosen to teach Core Knowledge from a whole-language approach (Core Knowledge gives teachers the freedom to make pedagogical choices). Our study began with the balance of nature in science, comparing how the Native Americans respected their land with how it is treated today. Using the content specified for 3rd grade, we discussed such terms as ecologists, fossil fuels, acid rain, greenhouse effect, and ozone layer.
This unit was easily integrated across the curriculum. In social studies, we used Venn diagrams to compare and contrast culture, beliefs, and daily lives of Eastern Woodland Tribes. Students also constructed replicas of the longhouse, chickee, and wigwam.
In language arts, students discovered examples of the four types of sentences through “The Quillwork Girl and Her Seven Brothers” and other Native American creation myths. Then they wrote their own creation myths and checked one another's work for inclusion of statements, questions, commands, and exclamations.
After reading “The Earth on Turtle's Back” from Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children by Michael Caduto and Joseph Bruchac, students made mock turtle rattles out of recycled sandwich containers. Then, outside, students took turns being blindfolded, testing their listening abilities to identify the location of the shaking rattle as it imitated the sound of a rattlesnake.
I taught a literature lesson on simile and metaphor using the Paul Goble story, “The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses.” Even in September, student writing was more exciting and detailed than I had ever remembered. At the conclusion of the unit, 8-year-old Jessica wrote: <POEM><TITLE>My Wild Horse</TITLE><POEMLINE>I have a horse her name is Prince.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>I love her very much.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>She is beautiful.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Her skin sparkles like the rain.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Her tail flows with the trees.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Her legs let her run with the sun.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>She is the prettiest of all.</POEMLINE></POEM>
The Core Knowledge Curriculum has convinced me that teaching meaningful content is far more rewarding than teaching vague skills and ambiguous units. As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has said: children from every ethnic and economic background should have access to a shared core of knowledge that is necessary to reading, understanding, and communication.
Following a unit on the Norsemen and their legends, one of my students was intrigued with finding out about the character Loki, a trickster. Matthew enthusiastically piped up, “That guy is in my comic books. He can change his form and play mean tricks! Do you think the comic book people got him from the Norsemen?”
Ah, to be literate! It makes my job meaningful.
