Elementary teachers: A handy new guide aligns OPI's IEFA lesson plans to the Common Core standards

If you teach elementary school and are revisiting your curriculum to make sure you are meeting the new Common Core standards, these new guides from the Indian Education Division at the OPI can help!

“In support of educators’ efforts connecting IEFA and MCCS, the Indian Education Division at the OPI has:

• Constructed elementary level COMPANION GUIDES—to provide guidance for instruction that incorporates IEFA resources aligned with Montana Common Core English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects Standards that have been identified as facilitating information about American Indians.”

• Links to the COMPANION GUIDES are available on the Indian Education web pages, as well as the Montana Common Core Standards web pages. You can also find them here.

The Indian Education division has also revised its elementary literature units to reflect MCCS alignment. As the introduction to the revised teaching units points out, these “IEFA units feature text dependent questions—those which specifically ask questions that can only be answered by referring explicitly back to the text being read—promoting close analytic reading.”

In addition, “in support of the greater emphasis on proficient reading of complex informational text, each unit specifies the use of related informational texts (regardless of whether the unit focus is fiction or non-fiction), within the lessons and/or extension activities.” You can check out the revised units here:

• Model Teaching Units Language Arts Elementary Level Volume One
• Model Teaching Units, Language Arts – Elementary Level, Volume Two

UPDATE: I just learned that after February 27, hard copies of these elementary guides will be available from the Indian Education Office on request. To receive a hard copy, contact Julie Saylor at jsaylor@mt.gov.