My Personal Benchmark Advance (Florida) Journey
Last year I coached teachers through using Benchmark Advance in Florida. Since I hadn’t ever used this curriculum myself, I definitely had no advantage of understanding it. So in my eyes, we worked together to figure it out and make it work to help our students grow. We definitely did a lot of trial and error and realized with our schedule we just couldn’t fit everything in that was included. We also reflected at the end of the year and know some things we want to continue doing this upcoming year... some things we want to tweak, and some things we want to toss out the window!
FREE Benchmark Advance Lesson Plans (K-1)
Click here to get the free lesson plans that we used for the year. Please remember that these have been modified to fit what we had time to teach and we will be making changes to them as we go this year, if needed. We broke our reading block into Shared Reading, IRA, Phonics, Writing and Small Group. A lot of our writing was done in connection with our IRA time since we did a lot of modeling. Then the students practiced writing during their centers. Writing is one area we want to focus on more this year, now that the other areas are very comfortable and we know what is needed to teach them successfully. Kindergarten Plans (Click Here)
Benchmark Advance Broken Down
Shared Reading (Kindergarten and 1st Grade)- Focus on fluency, finding high frequency words, and phonics skills.
IRA- Focus on vocabulary and comprehension (along with teaching the standards).
Phonics- Teach explicitly and systematically as it is set up in the curriculum. We know a lack of phonics knowledge and phonemic awareness is what makes our students tend to fall behind.
Writing- Integrate into IRA for guided practice and then let kids practice during centers.
Small Group/Centers- We used a mix between Guided Reading and Small Group Skill Based instruction.
Adjustments Needed This Year on My Benchmark Journey
I mentioned we are working on improving writing this year but another area we are also focusing on improving is the hands-on practice the students are doing during center/small group time. The skills being practiced in centers should mirror the skills being taught during the week or the previous week with some spiral review thrown in. You can check out some activities below that we created to help us with this process. These hands-on Activities are focused on phonics and high frequency word practice. Second Grade includes vocabulary practice too).
Questions?/Tips
What questions do you have about using Benchmark Advance in your classroom? Do you have any advice to share or ideas that you feel could help other teachers? Email me at holly@hunt4treasure.org and let’s connect!
Resources
Are you in need of a resource for hands-on practice connected to Benchmark Advance K-2? Check out these resources to get this up and going in your classroom!
*This post is not associated/or sponsored by with Benchmark Advance. This is just a teacher's view on how the curriculum can be implemented.
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