Foundational Literacy – the Primary & Middle School Curricula lay the foundation for High School

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Essay Engineering for Primary & Middle School

Curriculum research & development is geared towards developing the skills suitable for the intellectual development of each age group. This means one set of foundational skills for primary school and middle school students.

The beginner-level and intermediate-level curriculum is developed expressly for the younger student, and provide introductory instruction in the fundamental elements of Essay Engineering. The age-appropriate readings are both accessible and challenging, and the assignments are perfectly manageable. The readings are of course less complicated in language and meaning, but the fundamental skills of evidence-based thinking are taught with the necessary rigor that prepares the student for later sophistication.

Frequently Asked Question:

Q: Isn’t this awfully complex for primary and middle school students?

A: Students in the 9th grade are often required to write a five to nine page essay on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – so it stands to reason that they must be capable of developing the preliminary version of these skills in primary school and middle school. The emphasis in the primary school curriculum is on the meaning reconstruction Modules. These modules results in sophisticated understanding, but the module itself entails only a conceptually rudimentary and theoretically straightforward method.

Foundational and Fundamental Skills

The fundamentals of ‘meaning reconstruction’ teach younger students to practice essential skills. First, the younger student learns attention to detail through the careful study of paragraph and chapter, and learns to work with more challenging texts that contain sophisticated meaning.

After establishing these tools of ‘meaning reconstruction,’ middle school students are ready for the next stage of working with ‘meaning patterns’. In this stage, younger students learn to work the basic thought structures that develop the “category definitions”. With this conceptual framework, younger students are able to intuitively and naturally craft a short, single paragraphs – writing is second nature once the thought structures of analysis are explicated in their fundamentals and taught as a process. These thought structures consist in the evidence-based, rigorous analysis of textual meaning and the inductive synthesis of these to create ‘meaning patterns’. Students then learn to connect individual paragraphs, which is the essence of crafting the short essay.

Students are most successful when they can gradually transition from one grade to the next, and each grade lays the foundation for more advanced skills. For this reason, the ideal curriculum for primary school will naturally prepare students for the advanced literacy of secondary school. Primary school students in grades 1-4 (age 6-10) can benefit greatly from practicing and acquiring the basics of evidence-based thinking.