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MYP Consolidated Year 1 Objectives & Strands

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MYP Consolidated Year 1 Objectives & Strands

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Consolidated MYP Year 1 Objectives and Strands

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Strand Level Cross-Disciplinary Literacy Skills

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Strand Level Cross-Disciplinary Literacy Skills

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Using Year 1 Objectives as a Disciplinary Literacy Tool

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Email: jenny@erinkentconsulting.com

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-killion-57919525a/

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Disciplinary Literacy and the Value of Making Connections

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Disciplinary Literacy and the Value of Making Connections

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A brief article on the International Literacy Association website offers an introduction to disciplinary literacy.

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Literacy Daily is a space to connect educators, students, and leaders with the latest news, ideas, tools, strategies, and research in literacy instruction.

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An excerpt from Wolsey, T. D., & Lapp, D. (2024). Literacy in the Disciplines: A Teacher’s Guide for Grades 5–12 (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

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Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy

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Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy

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Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59.

The current notion of disciplinary literacy can be traced to a series of articles and books that emerged in the mid-to-late 2000s (T. Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Moje, 2007, 2008; McConachie & Petrosky, 2010). These researchers identified the need for increased attention to how teachers can build literacy capacity in their students while also more effectively teaching the content and thinking patterns of the discipline.

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What Are the Literacy Demands of Experts in the Disciplines?

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What Are the Literacy Demands of Experts in the Disciplines?

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An excerpt from Wolsey, T. D., & Lapp, D. (2024). Literacy in the Disciplines: A Teacher’s Guide for Grades 5–12 (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

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Strand Level Unpacking: Literacy Skills & Strategies

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Definitely one of my favorites of the moment - SO much great work!

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The Learning Dispatch | Carl Hendrick | Substack

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Making sense of how learning happens. Click to read The Learning Dispatch, by Carl Hendrick, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

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ISUganda SS SoW Foundations - January 2026

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The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley Buy this book from: You may need a writing revolution in your classroom. Here's how to lead it. Expectations about student writing have changed dramatically in recent years.

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Back to Results

Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

John Warner

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and...

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules-such as the five-paragraph essay-designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

Reviews

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.

I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it-sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh.

What is to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

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Book Details

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The Problem of Assessment and Standardization
The Problem of Educational Fads
The Problem of Technology Hype
The Problem of Folklore
The Problem of Precarity
Part III: A New Framework
Why School?
Increasing Rigor
The Writer's Practice
Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing
Writing Experiences
Increasing Challenges
Part IV: Unanswered Questions
What about Academics?
What about Grammar?
What about Grades?
What about the Children?
What about the Teachers?
In Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author

John Warner is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a contributing blogger for Inside Higher Ed, and an editor at large for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the author or coeditor of seven books, including The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.

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Back to Results Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities John Warner An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis.

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Season 3 Episode 5 | Writing is hard-and teaching writing is even harder. But science tells us it's well worth the effort, because writing flexes the mental muscles that nurture literacy and learning.

Host Natalie Wexler connects cognitive science to specific writing practices that transfer information from working to long-term memory and require students to retrieve and elaborate on that information. She's joined by psychologists John Sweller and Jeffrey Karpicke, whose research has identified effective instructional and academic strategies for teaching, learning, and lightening students' cognitive loads.

"Writing isn't just a product-it's part of the process of learning. In fact, evidence shows that having students write about what they're learning can result in dramatic cognitive benefits," Wexler says.

Learning and putting new information to use is a two-way process: students must first transfer new information from working to long-term memory. Then they must be able to remember that information by retrieving it from their memory stores. Writing supports both.

Karpicke describes an experiment in which college students read science texts in different conditions. Compared to students who read the text once, twice or created a concept map, students who read the text once and then wrote down everything they remembered, recalled significantly more about the topic a week later.

Many studies have found the same result: writing boosts memory. But not all writing has the same impact. Writing prompts that require elaboration, such as "how" or "why" questions, help expand and strengthen understanding by drawing new connections to the material. And writing is not equally effective for all students. Inexperienced writers can be so cognitively overwhelmed by the task of writing that it actually impedes learning.

Wexler explains how teachers can ease the cognitive burden on students who are learning to write. First, they can ask students to write about content they've already learned about, so they don't have to juggle new information in working memory along with the cognitive demands of writing. That approach also helps deepen students' knowledge of curriculum content.

Sweller describes how teachers also can provide opportunities for "deliberate practice," which can make foundational literacy skills automatic. For example, students who have mastered spelling rules don't have to think about spelling when they write. Higher-order writing skills never become completely automatic, but practice helps. For example, students who practice distinguishing between complete sentences and fragments, with feedback from a teacher, eventually "develop a gut sense of what makes a sentence a sentence," Wexler notes.

These processes work together to enhance student writing-which accelerates literacy and knowledge-not as an end-product, but an active part of the learning process.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by

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Natalie Wexler on Memory and the Writing Effect | Literacy and the Science of Learning

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Season 3 Episode 5 | Writing is hard-and teaching writing is even harder. But science tells us it's well worth the effort, because writing flexes the mental mus

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Suggested G5-12 Writing Scope & Sequence: Macro Level

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G6 Humanities Labsite - ISU, February 2026

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Belonging and Beyond- How Social Connections Shape Our World.pdf

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Create custom puzzles based on the Connections New York Times daily game

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Many schools we work with are utilizing Think SRSD with great results!

Supported by decades of research, Releasing Writers combines explicit writing strategies with tools for self-regulation and in ways that address the multiple levels of langauge and latest wider literacy advances in our field – so students not only write better — they take ownership of their process and master all dimensions of writing.

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think SRSD (self-regulated strategy development)

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SRSD (Self-regulated strategy development) PD for schools, led by teachers, coaches & school leaders who all saw ELA proficiency gains