Journeys

Journeys materials for Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 do not meet expectations for alignment. Materials partially meet the expectations for Gateway 1. Materials provide support for foundational skills development, directly teaching skills to build reading, although systematic and explicit instruction in practice is inconsistent. Text quality and rigor is mostly appropriate, and texts are accompanied by text-dependent questions and tasks. The materials do not meet expectations for Gateway 2. Materials partially grow knowledge as some texts are organized around topics; however, sets of cohesive questions and tasks are not consistently text-focused. Year-long supports for building students’ academic vocabulary, for supporting writing development, and for independent reading are inconsistent and may require additional support.

The Journeys instructional materials for grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 do not meet expectations for alignment. Each grade-level partially meets expectations for Gateway 1 and does not meet expectations for Gateway 2. Materials partially support students' increasing writing skills over the course of the school year and do include some progression of focused research projects.  Although texts are organized around a theme with some topic organization, the materials do not consistently support building students' knowledge of topics or themes over the course of a school year, and Informational texts are often short and lack engaging, content-area vocabulary. The materials do contain some sets of text-dependent questions and tasks; however, the questions and tasks do not consistently require students to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas across both individual and multiple texts, and culminating tasks do not consistently promote the building of students’ knowledge of the theme/topic. The year-long vocabulary planning does not ensure that students will interact with and build key academic vocabulary words across texts throughout the year, and grammar and conventions lessons and practice are often not aligned to grade-level standards.

The Journeys instructional materials for grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 do not meet expectations for alignment. Each grade-level partially meets expectations for Gateway 1 and does not meet expectations for Gateway 2. Materials partially support students' increasing writing skills over the course of the school year and do include some progression of focused research projects.  Although texts are organized around a theme with some topic organization, the materials do not consistently support building students' knowledge of topics or themes over the course of a school year, and Informational texts are often short and lack engaging, content-area vocabulary. The materials do contain some sets of text-dependent questions and tasks; however, the questions and tasks do not consistently require students to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas across both individual and multiple texts, and culminating tasks do not consistently promote the building of students’ knowledge of the theme/topic. The year-long vocabulary planning does not ensure that students will interact with and build key academic vocabulary words across texts throughout the year, and grammar and conventions lessons and practice are often not aligned to grade-level standards.