COMMON+CORE

This site is dedicated understanding and implementing the new Common Core Standards. Helpful tips and resources are included on this page.
 * COMMON CORE **

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//** What are Common Core Standards? **// The Common Core Standards address English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. There is a concerted emphasis in each area to prepare students to be college and career ready. These standards came about from discussions by State Governors and is designed to create some unity among the states on what is taught, thereby making the comparisons of student achievement in the United States more comparable. In addition, colleges said students weren't ready to face the demands of college curricula, and businesses said schools weren't producing graduates ready to become productive workers. To help address these concerns and understanding that education is the responsibility of the states not the Federal Government, each state had representation in writing the standards and could contribute up to 15% of their own content to the standards. These are not national standards set forth by the Federal Government, but rather the result of collective efforts by the states to bring more uniformity and increased rigor into the educational experiences of the students in this country.

These standards require that students know what to do with the skills and concepts that they have learned, rather than just memorize definitions and formulas. Higher order thinking skills, independent interaction with text, and application in problem solving situations are among the expectations of the Common Core Standards. Students will be required to think at deeper levels, evaluate sources and potential solutions, justify and support opinions, and be independent learners.

//**What the Standards Don't Do**// While the Common Core Standards provide clear direction for teaching literacy and depth of knowledge, they do NOT tell teachers specifically what to teach, as most of these standards apply to any content area or topic. They also do not address how to teach students who are below or above grade level expectations, or English Language Learners. But the expectation is that ALL students will master these standards and their ability to become literate.

//**English Language Arts (ELA)**// The basis of the ELA standards are the Anchor Standards for Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. These anchor standards are broad in scope and are designed to establish what every student is expected to know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school. These anchor standards are applied K-12, with grade level standards for each strand that break down the anchor standards into appropriate skills and content for that particular grade level. The rigor (difficulty and complexity) increases as students advance through the grades preparing for graduation.

In addition to the strands most closely associated with reading and language arts content, a section devoted to History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects is also a part of the ELA standards. The emphasis of all the ELA standards as well as those for non-English subject areas is to promote literacy.... the ability to communicate what you know and understand. This applies to all content areas and is the responsibility of all teachers to ensure content literacy through the tools and skills learned in the ELA standards.

The ELA Standards address the fundamentals of reading (foundations) in elementary grades; the reading of literary and informational text; writing; speaking and listening; and language K-12. The History/Social Studies, Science and Technical subjects apply to grades 6-12.

//**Mathematics**// The Math Standards contain the general Mathematical Practices that apply to all grade levels, and to some degree, all content areas. Key skills addressed in these 8 practices focus students on problem solving skills, perseverance, and higher order thinking skills. Skills are broken down into grade levels that progressively build to more difficult and complex use of mathematical concepts. The high school is given the option of maintaining a traditional course structure or moving to a more integrated approach to math.

One of the goals of the **Standards of Mathematical Practice** is to help students make sense of a problem. In the following video we see that students often don't understand the components of a problem, thus fail to make sense of the problem. The problem is as follows: //There are 125 sheep in the flock and 5 dogs. How old is the shepherd?// What is your response? What do you think the typical class of students would say? Consider the message seen in this video: How old is the Shepherd ?

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 * Websites to help you understand and implement Common Core Standards **


 * EduCore - Tools for Teaching the Common Core **a website FULL of great resources (video, print, templates, rubrics, etc.) provided by ASCD through funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


 * Kansas Common Core** - the KSDE site to provide specific information about Kansas Common Core Standards


 * National PTA Parent Website** for Common Core - an important piece of the implementation puzzle is to inform and include parents as schools begin implementing Common Core.

HOW TO READ THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS


 * Old Standards ---ELA ---MATH **

Standard -Strand ---Domain

Benchmark -Boxed Subheadings --Cluster

Indicator ---Standard (anchor & grade level) Standard

**ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS (ELA) ** The following resources are helpful to teaching...
 * ** Vocabulary ** in a way that helps students make connections to the learning and promote remembering words beyond the spelling/vocabulary test. This article is from ASCD's Educational Leadership On-Line Journal, summer 2012, with the focus on //Strong Readers All//: Vocabulary: 5 Common Misconceptions
 * ** Depth of Knowledge ** (increasing thinking levels - with Bloom's Taxonomy comparison in the definitions page)

**LESSON/UNIT DESIGN** with the Common Core in Mind Common Core Lesson Plans don't have to be this difficult! Here's a little xtra normal humor before you get into actually designing your lessons.

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