LITERATURE

At My City School, our Literature program is built on the belief that every student deserves access to rich literature and higher-level thinking, regardless of their current reading level. Rather than waiting for students to become proficient readers before asking them to analyze literature, we provide the tools and scaffolding that allow them to engage deeply with complex texts while continuing to strengthen foundational reading skills through targeted intervention.

  • Practice summarizing and identifying the main idea of a passage

  • Read books with character driven scenarios and connect to social interactions

  • Explore themes of challenge and resiliency and actions and consequences

  • Examine the value of team work and cooperation through non-fiction texts

Grades 4-5 Understanding motivation
Grades 6 - 8 Connection and Analysis

  • Engage in literary analysis through guided discussions, annotations, and graphic organizers

  • Develop reading comprehension strategies including visualization, clarification, and making predictions and inferences

  • Identify and cite evidence

  • Make connections across texts, history, and personal experience

  • Practice a repeatable process for analyzing literature that develops access to increasingly rigorous text

California Common Core Standards (CCCS)

Grounded in CCCS for ELA/Literacy, our program ensures that students are working within the parameters of grade level expectations, while also strengthening and solidifying individual foundational needs.

Our goal is for every student to leave My City School with the confidence, strategies, and independence to successfully access and analyze challenging texts throughout high school, college, and beyond. Because many of our students learn differently, we are committed to making text accessible without lowering expectations. Instruction is individualized using a wide range of supports based on each student's learning profile, including pre-reading, audiobooks, guided annotation, enlarged text, graphic organizers, speech-to-text, visual supports, discussion-based learning, and other accommodations that remove barriers to comprehension while preserving the intellectual challenge of the material. This approach allows students to continue developing sophisticated critical thinking and analytical skills while dedicated reading intervention focuses on strengthening decoding, fluency, grammar, and other foundational literacy skills.