Teaching & Learning

Our Vision

Literacy unlocks new pathways, exposes passions, and unearths curiosities. Our commitment is to use high-quality instructional materials grounded in the science of reading and evidence-based literacy instructional practice to develop all students as skilled readers, writers, communicators, and researchers. As a result, students will broaden their background knowledge of the world and fuel their discovery of who they want to be and what they want to do.

Our Goals

Our curriculum is aligned with the 2024 Virginia Standards of Learning and organized around the following goals that guide instruction and assessment to develop all students as readers, writers, researchers, and communicators.

Readers as Researchers

Know and apply the relationships among letters, sounds, word parts, and vocabulary as they become fluent, strategic, and independent readers.
Read closely for complex ideas and information to make connections within and across texts.
Question and synthesize information on a topic.
Engage with a variety of texts and sources to spark interest and recognize the value of reading.
Explore perspectives through texts and sources to foster cultural competency, global citizenship, and empathy.

Writers as Communicators

Know and apply the relationships among letters, sounds, word parts, and vocabulary as they become fluent, strategic, and independent writers.
Engage in the writing process to cultivate voice, style, and clarity.

Our Instructional Approach

All students will have access to high-quality teachers, instruction, resources, and opportunities grounded in evidence-based literacy instruction. Students will see themselves and their personal experiences reflected in the texts they explore and create. Comprehensive daily reading and writing experiences will include systematic, explicit instruction, guided practice, and independent practice in order to meet students’ individual needs.

Learning to Read

Learning to read targets developing foundational literacy skills in the following components: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This approach requires decoding and recognizing words. It also requires making meaning of the words, sentences and genres we hear and read.

Reading to Learn

Reading to learn promotes the application of effective strategies and skills to extract, analyze, and apply knowledge from a range of texts and sources enabling students to be self-directed, informed, and curious learners.

Learning to Write

Learning to write is modeled and coached as a process where we provide feedback and guidance that focuses on organization, word choice, voice, and conventions of writing. It also requires segmenting words into components and applying learned spelling patterns.

Writing to Communicate

Writing to communicate fosters effective expression to share ideas, connect with others, and impact society across visual, spoken, written, and multimodal contexts.

Questions? Please call the NNPS Elementary English Office at (757)283-7850 x.10245.