English Language Arts & Reading Curriculum

Our vision: is to be a place where all students will access diverse, thought-provoking, relevant, and rigorous texts in order to be skilled readers, writers, and analytical thinkers. Families will be able to support their young person’s learning through enriching opportunities at home and on campus. By cultivating a culture of literacy that empowers students to have curiosity and a passion for learning, students will have high-quality instructional experiences that encourage critical thinking, comprehension, and collaboration across content. Literacy at PTAA is all-encompassing and transferable across content in all grades K–12. We believe all students will acquire strong foundations for robust academic growth in reading and writing with a focus on student strengths while instilling a love of reading that will prepare them for a choice-filled future in college, career, or military.

The Amplify Texas Elementary Literacy Program has been built on state standards and the Science of Reading, in tight alignment with structured literacy concepts taught in the Texas Reading Academies. The program is designed to meet 100% of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) in English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS) in K–5 and is available to cover English as a Second Language standards. With these materials, students can complete a full skills lesson focused on building strong foundational reading skills, as well as a full separate knowledge-focused lesson that builds background around key topics or themes while focusing on comprehension in grades K–2. In grades 3–5, students begin building on foundational reading skills, so skills and knowledge units are integrated as unified lessons.

• K-2 Skills (Phonics) units that cover the Developing and Sustaining Foundational Literacy strand in the ELAR TEKS. Daily lessons are designed to take 60 minutes each day.
• K-5 Knowledge units that cover ELAR TEKS with an emphasis on building vocabulary and background knowledge. In grades K-2, these are structured as units separate from skills, are designed to take 60 minutes each day, and would be used alongside the K-2 Skills units. In grades 3-5, these are structured to cover all of the ELAR TEKS, designed to take 120 minutes for grade 3 and 90 minutes for grades 4 and 5.

Through daily exercises that feature text with growing complexity, an emphasis on classroom interactivity, oral comprehension, contextual vocabulary, and with speaking and writing in response to the reading, students develop mastery of ELAR TEKS while building background knowledge and rich vocabulary that is a key to literacy. The product is designed around research that shows new vocabulary is more likely to be remembered when offered in a knowledge-coherent context. This serves to dual function of full TEKS coverage and creates a coherently sequenced set of knowledge units within each grade level, and across all K–5 units.

Creating passionate, critical readers in Grades 6–12 begins with literature that relates to their lives. With diverse, culturally relevant texts that connect with students' lives, our HMH Into Literature curriculum builds confidence, standards mastery, and college and career readiness for every learner in the classroom. The program provides in-text assistance for multilingual learners in each lesson, including extra vocabulary, cultural context points, writing stems, grammar practice, and peer-coaching videos. All students, regardless of their backgrounds or abilities, will see themselves reflected in our texts. Students can choose how they want to extend their learning independently with Reader's Choice opportunities and the lesson resource links available in the Student Edition.