Our Standards & Approach

Common Core ELA standards — Reading Foundational Skills, Informational Text, and Literature, K–12. Every reading skill in a packet is mapped to a specific standard at the learner's grade.

Structured Literacy following Orton-Gillingham principles, grounded in the Science of Reading: explicit, systematic, sequential, multisensory, and synthetic-phonics-first. K–3 emphasizes phoneme awareness, letter–sound work, and decoding from CVC through vowel teams and syllable types. Grades 3+ add syllable division and morphology (prefixes, roots, suffixes) before pure comprehension drills. We explicitly avoid three-cueing and whole-word guessing.

Common Core Math standards, K–12, across Counting & Cardinality, Operations & Algebraic Thinking, Number & Operations in Base Ten and Fractions, Ratios & Proportional Relationships, Expressions & Equations, Functions, Geometry, and Statistics & Probability.

The Concrete–Representational–Abstract (CRA) progression: start with real objects or manipulatives, move to visual models (number lines, area models, bar models), then to abstract notation. Conceptual understanding comes before procedural fluency. Word problems require the learner to name what's known, what's asked, and a plan before computing — aligned to the Standards for Mathematical Practice (make sense of problems, reason abstractly and quantitatively).

Common Core Writing standards, K–12, across the three text types — opinion/argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative — with grade-appropriate structure and complexity.

An explicit, process-based approach: plan → draft → revise → edit. Structure is taught directly — topic, detail, closing in younger grades; claim, evidence, reasoning in upper elementary and beyond. We build sentence-level skill alongside composition and push for ideas developed with real evidence, not just length. From grade 6, learners explicitly practice acknowledging a counterclaim where the standard calls for it.