Introducing Story Champs® Grade-Level Curriculum for Teachers!
Multitiered narrative and expository, oral and written, academic language and knowledge building instruction for general education teachers.
Why Stories? The Power of Narrative as an Instructional Vehicle
Better Storytellers. Better Readers. Better Writers.
Storytelling is central to human cognition and culture. We use narrative to make sense of experience, communicate with others, understand why people do what they do, and build a coherent sense of who we are. When instruction leverages storytelling, as is done in Story Champs® Curriculum, we work with the grain of how students’ brains are organized. Language learning does not get delivered to students in a story. It emerges from it and students gain far more than language along the way.
Storytelling builds the cognitive architecture students need for a lifetime of learning. It exercises working memory because a student must hold the arc of a story in memory while formulating each sentence, tracking characters, and monitoring whether the listener is following, all at once. Oral narrative is also the bridge between conversation and academic written language; students who can tell a well-organized story have already mastered many of the discourse conventions that academic text will later demand. Simply put, better storytellers become better reader and writers.
Narrative & Expository – Oral & Written
Story Champs® Curriculum was designed to help educators provide explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic instruction for oral and written academic language as a complement to early-grade phonics and transcription instruction. As students master sophisticated language within highly meaningful narrative and expository contexts, they simultaneously build a deep reservoir of science and social studies content. By integrating these essential components, Story Champs® Curriculum is an effective, evidence-based academic language program with an embedded knowledge-building system for early elementary students.
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Just 30 minutes a day to build narrative and expository language comprehension and production skills
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Built-in flexibility with multiple ways to differentiate within each lesson and across the week, month, and year
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New stories and information passages for each grade-level curriculum
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Extension activities help teachers weave the language patterns, concepts, vocabulary, and strategies into any curriculum
How Story Champs® Curriculum works with Story Champs® Intervention
In the most meaningful ways, Story Champs® Curriculum and the original Story Champs® Intervention are exactly the same. They both benefit from carefully constructed stories and paragraphs that have the essential academic language patterns. They both target the same types of words, sentences, and discourse types, as well as inferential strategies. The explicit and systematic teaching procedures are also the same. However, they differ in practical ways as shown in the above graphic. Want to learn more? Reach out to one of our implementation specialists here.