High-Quality Instructional Materials for Each Child

We are working with a district that is looking to adopt a new science curriculum, so I looked at 3rd grade science. I was actually shocked to find only 3 selelections (two of which did not meet expectations). Amplify Science partially met expectations while California Elevate Science and Exploring Sceince did not meet expectations. I looked deeper into California Elevate out of curiousity. I found the overview to be quite useful because I know that teachers who use certain curriculum which may not be considered high quality may be hesitant to shift because of their familiarity with the given curriculum. Therefore, it would be important to not only be able to tell them it does not meet expectations, but it would afford more teacher "buy-in" if there was objective evidence to back that up.

Throughout the past three years, many of our districts have adopted a new ELA curriculum. This year, we are working with two districts that are looking to adopt a new ELA curriculum for next year. I very pleased to see the Wonders 2020 Reading Series was very highly rated. In fact, for all K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 it met all expectations for ALL areas. I love that you can drill down to all the indicators and see if there are some that are lacking to meet the expectations. I will be sharing this with our districts as they continue to review new reading series for next year. 

The indicators are definitely very helpful and make a deeper analysis much more meaningful.

Our 12th grade English classes are looking for curriculum/materials that support the cohort of students that are not planning on college. So I found the ARC Core materials and read the detailed review from EdReports on that program. It sounds like a really robust, high-quality option  for our students but the cost would need to be established, of course. I wish that the reviews included history/government as well instead of  just English, Math and Science.

I looked up McGraw Hill Illustrative Mathematics for grades 6-8. It did not surprise me that it met standards in both allignment and usability. We adopted this curriculum 3 years ago, and some teachers did not like the curriculum at first and wanted to use a curriculum that was not alligned as well.

Out of curiosity, I looked up elementary science curriculums, since we currently do not have one. I was surprised to find only 3 options, and the best option only met the usability standards partially. Amplify Science was the only curriculum that I would feel okay to recommend for our district.

I'm wondering if the teachers even came around to liking the new math curriculum. Sometimes it takes working through the lessons for them to start to like it. I hope they came around since it aligned to the standards. 

Our ELA department is in the middle of a curriculum review. I chose to look at Amplify ELA 6th grade. It meets the criteria for high-quality in each category. I was surprised to see that it has perfect scores across the board. I think this would be a great resource for our Language Arts department to adopt.

Our district is needing to replace our Social Studies. This would be great to have all teachers vested in this curriculum to review and share their preferences with the administrator for common interests before requesting samples for review.

On the other side, it might be fun to see how current curriculum being used-NOT up for renewal-to see how they fair in Ohio Materials Matter.

Our district has recently adopted new English, Math, and Science curriculum. I wish I had known about this resource earlier :) We are now working on Physical Education, Music, and Art and nothing came up for those content areas in Ohio Materials Matter. Does anyone know of other resources that would be helpful to find curricula in those areas so I could share that with our curriculum director. Thank you!

After recently going through adopting new curriculum materials, this was very good timing to follow-up with a deeper dive to ensure our choices were valid. Seeing how well Amplify performed was very reassuring. It was very interesting to read the various ratings and understand that just because something might have a well-known name/publisher doesn't always equate to high quality.

To my knowledge, our district is not in the process of choosing any new K-4 curriculum. I did search the curriculums we are currently using and found that they meet the expectations, as I was expecting. I know our district spends a lot of time and effort to make sure we choice great curriculums to meet the needs of all of our students. 

Our district will be adopting a new science curriculum for high school. I searched on Ohio Materials Matter Reviews and unfortunately only found one high-quality choice (there were 3 in total). The one choice was a biology curriculum which does not cover all of our science needs. The overview that was given was useful, but with nothing to compare to, it was not what I was hoping for.

My district just adopted Great Minds' Wit & Wisdom for our elementary ELA curriculum. I was surprised that this site did not have a review of it, especially because it was used as an example in the course. (I was happy to see the good grades it got from the screen shots.) I did look up other examples of 3rd grade ELA curricula and found a few that did not meet the requirements to get "green" on the rating scale. It was interesting to look deeper into the ratings. We are going to be adopting a new math series this school year, but I do not know what it is called. I will keep this site bookmarked so I can look at it later.