Content Update: Beta ELA Practice
Planned
OLDER POST ALERT!
This is an older post about our beta ELA content, and some things have changed. Check out the latest post here instead!
Oh hi there! Allison, Sharon, and Tom here — and together we are … Khan Academy’s English Language Arts (aka ELA) Content team. Excited for some beta ELA content? Us too :)
Get in touch
We'd love to hear what you think — let us know via this short and sweet feedback form.
Defining beta
What do we mean by “beta” in this context? In short, think of the content as being in a “preview” state; a work in progress. Don’t get us wrong: we'd love for learners and teachers to try it out and give us feedback on what you like, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see more of. But please do so with the understanding that none of the courses are yet fully complete, stable, or Done with a capital D; they’ll be evolving over the course of the 2019-20 US school year and beyond.
Keep in mind that things will change from time to time — e.g.:
- links to content and courses might change,
- some exercises may get consolidated, while others get split in two, and...
- in some cases we may remove content.
As you can see, right now the courses just consist of practice exercises. Don't worry — we absolutely plan to add instruction too; we just haven't created it yet :)
Course types
We have two types of beta course in development:
- Courses that focus specifically on reading and vocab standards.
- "Integrated" courses that cover reading, writing, vocab, and grammar all together in every unit. Each unit is themed around a particular topic (e.g. growth mindset, fantasy worlds), building and reinforcing key vocabulary and related content knowledge throughout.
We're especially interested to hear teacher feedback on the relative usefulness of these two approaches, including whether one approach fits certain classroom applications better than the other (e.g. station rotations, intervention).
What to expect over the 2019-2020 US school year
We'll continue to build out content through summer 2020 so that we have a solid breadth of practice and instruction coverage across reading, writing, vocab, and grammar for grades 2-8, plus we also hope to add some prototype grade 9 content too.
The content is aligned to US Common Core State Standards for Language, Reading Informational Text, Reading Literature, and Writing; the passages we use in our practice are also designed to fall within Common Core-aligned text complexity ranges for each grade level. We’ll work on surfacing this information throughout the content as the school year goes on, including adding CCSS tagging like we already have in our math content.
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