Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 3-5. Leslie Blauman
and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading K–12
Source: Common Core State Standards
The 3–5 Reading Standards outlined on the following pages define what students should understand and be able to do by the end of each grade. Here on this page we present the College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards for K–12 so you can see how students in grades 3–5 work toward the same goals as a high school senior: it’s a universal, K–12 vision. The CCR anchor standards and the grade-specific standards correspond to one another by numbers 1–10. They are necessary complements: the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity. Together, they define the skills and understandings that all students must eventually demonstrate.
Key Ideas and Details
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
Craft and Structure
4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.
5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.
6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.*
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
* Please consult the full Common Core State Standards document (and all updates and appendices) at http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy. See “Research to Build Knowledge” in the Writing section and “Comprehension and Collaboration” in the Speaking and Listening section for additional standards relevant to gathering, assessing, and applying information from print and digital sources.
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity
10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
Note on Range and Content of Student Reading
To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success.
Source: © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading K–12
The College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards are the same for K–12. The guiding principle here is that the core reading skills should not change as students advance; rather, the level at which they learn and can perform these skills should increase in complexity as students move from one grade to the next. However, for grades 3–5, we have to recognize that the standards were back mapped from the secondary grades—the authors envisioned what college students needed and then wrote standards, working their way down the grades. Thus, as you use this book remember that children in grades 3–5 can’t just “jump over” developmental milestones in an ambitious attempt toward an anchor standard. There are certain life and learning experiences they need to have, and certain concepts they need to learn, before they are capable of handling many complex academic skills in a meaningful way. The anchor standards nonetheless are goal posts to work toward. As you read the “gist” of the standards on the following pages, remember they represent what our 3–5 students will grow into during each year and deepen later in middle school and high school.
Key Ideas and Details
This first strand of reading standards emphasizes students’ ability to identify key ideas and themes in a text, whether literary, informational, primary, or foundational; whether print, graphic, quantitative, or mixed media. The focus of this first set of standards in on reading to understand, during which students focus on what the text says. The premise is that students cannot delve into the deeper (implicit) meaning of any text if they cannot first grasp the surface (explicit) meaning of that text. Beyond merely identifying these ideas, readers must learn to see how these ideas and themes, or the story’s characters and events, develop and evolve over the course of a text. Such reading demands that students know how to identify, evaluate, assess, and analyze the elements of a text for their importance, function, and meaning within the text.
Craft and Structure
The second set of standards builds on the first, focusing not on what the text says but how it says it, the emphasis here being on analyzing how texts are made to serve a function or achieve a purpose. These standards ask readers to examine the choices the author makes in terms of words, sentence, and paragraph structure and how these choices contribute to the meaning of the text and the author’s larger purpose. Inherent in the study of craft and structure is how these items interact with and influence the ideas and details outlined in the first three standards.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
This third strand might be summed up as: reading to extend or deepen one’s knowledge of a subject by comparing what a range of sources have said about it over time and across different media. In addition, these standards emphasize the importance of being able to read the arguments; that is, they look at how to identify the claims the texts make and evaluate the evidence used to support those claims regardless of the media. Finally, these standards ask students to analyze the choice of means and medium the author chooses and the effect those choices have on ideas and details. Thus, if a writer integrates words, images, and video in a mixed-media text, readers should be able to examine how and why the author did that in terms of stylistic and rhetorical purposes.
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity
The Common Core State Standards document itself offers the most useful explanation of what this last standard means in a footnote