By Amy Alpert
After field testing several reading programs throughout the district over the last several years, teachers chose the Wit and Wisdom Literacy Program. Michael Henault, Assistant Superintendent for the Central Berkshire Regional School District, which includes the Becket Washington Elementary School, says that the program focuses on knowledge building. Wit and Wisdom is a comprehensive K–8 English language arts curriculum crafted to help students build the knowledge and skills they need to be successful readers, exceptional writers, and effective communicators.
Instruction is tied to how students develop knowledge through an awareness of how to read texts, write, speak and listen. They develop their vocabulary through use of grade-level literature in combination with visual arts. In the younger grades, for example K-1, this is supplemented with a phonics-based program called Fundations.
In Ms. Kelleher’s K-1 class, students are posed with an “Essential Question” and a “Question for the Day” from a book they read the day before and a picture presented with the lesson. The teacher asks the class questions based upon the picture, stimulating critical thinking.
On a recent day in Ms. Griffin’s 4th grade class, questions were based on the book Thank You Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. The lesson gave the students the opportunity for collaboration with “Think-Pair-Share” during which they had to listen to one another and have a discussion after being posed a question. They also had to think deeper and write about how Thank You Mr. Falker builds their knowledge base, which serves the writing component.
The developers of Wit and Wisdom believe classrooms should be places where students and teachers encounter wit, wisdom, wonder, rigor and knowledge and that knowledge has a multiplier effect—the earlier you begin to build knowledge, the better you do academically in later years.
The ongoing attention to enhanced curriculum—like the roll out of the Wit and Wisdom Literacy program—is likely one of the many factors that led to the Becket Washington Elementary School being recognized as a School of Recognition in Massachusetts (www.doe.mass.edu/accountability/recognition.html). This honor is attributed to a small number of schools that demonstrate progress toward annual accountability targets, emphasizing the performance of all students in the school.
