Reply to Everyone hates Benchmark. FCPS do better.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t understand the criticism that all the reading selections were nonfiction. I am very happy that more of my children's ELA instruction is based in nonfiction. My older children didn't actually start learning anything meaningful during ELA until they got to middle school because way too much of ELA was focused on independent reading of novels and creative or narrative writing. There was no substantial instruction.

At home, our children read fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, and there was rich discussion of their reading, which was quite clearly not happening in school. We also taught them grammar since that too was not happening in school.

My sister-in-law teaches middle school ELA, and she has told us for the past 15 years, it has been obvious that the ELA instruction in elementary school has been extremely poor. She has had to,teach seventh grade children basics, such as the  parts of speech, paragraph structure, how to use commas, etc.

Benchmark might not be perfect, but it is at least teaching something, unlike the previous approach many teachers took.[/quote]
+1 Although I’m not blaming teachers at all. My fifth grader is writing more now than my 9th grader ever has. The 9th grader has never had to compose a proper essay and isn’t an intuitive speller and it’s a struggle with all the writing that comes with high school. My 5th grader is learning to write essays now and actively works on spelling. She doesn’t love benchmark lol but I feel she will be more prepared for high school. I always found it so odd how little writing my older child had to do for ES in MS relative to my own academic experience. (Again, not blaming teachers and yes, I could have supplemented at home.) [/quote]

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