Curriculum & Instruction

In order to provide our students with rigorous and relevant lessons that will prepare them for both college and careers, Northbridge Public Schools use curriculum, instruction and assessment resources that are aligned to both the MA state frameworks and the Common Core Standards.

In addition to the social-emotional learning embedded in the academic curriculum, the district also uses Committee for Children, the Second Step® family of program to provide holistic approach to social-emotional learning for all students in grades PreK-8. Second Step® Social Emotional Learning (SEL) provides resources that enable teachers to teach social-emotional skills and concepts in an engaging way. Second Step® SEL is designed to help children thrive and be more successful in school—ultimately setting them up to be thoughtful and productive adults. SEL concepts provide an extra dimension to education, focusing on improving cooperation, communication, and decision making. In a world where emotional intelligence is critical for lifelong happiness, successful careers, and healthier relationships, SEL gives students a framework for developing these skills.

Preschool Program

The Preschool Program at Northbridge Elementary School is an integrated program that serves 3 and 4 year old children. The goal of the program is to build self-esteem, encourage creative thinking and develop social interaction.

The program is language based and incorporates developmentally appropriate practices. Children learn skills through play and hands-on activities. A strong emphasis is placed on language development. Each integrated preschool classroom is staffed with a Massachusetts certified teacher and teaching assistants. In addition to the classroom teachers, a full-time speech and language pathologist, school adjustment counselor, and nurse are on staff.

The preschool curriculum is aligned to Massachusetts Common Core Standards to best prepare students for kindergarten. Teachers use Get Set For School, Lively Letters, and other resources to help children meet important early learning standards through purposeful play, and multisensory activities.

Get Set for School is a complete, developmentally appropriate Pre-K program that is expert-backed, research-based, and proven to be a success. Children who develop strong foundation skills are better prepared to meet the rigorous demands of school. The Get Set for School program prepares children for elementary school with a robust curriculum that incorporates academic content areas aligned to state learning standards and supports instruction that values a balance of structure and play, social-emotional learning, and ongoing assessment and communication between teachers, families, and support staff. The curriculum uses hands-on, playful teaching strategies and materials to make learning fun and engaging for children. Through active participation, Pre-K students acquire and retain knowledge easily and effectively. The curriculum targets 6 learning domains that other publishers do not. These consist of: Language & Literacy, Physical Development, Social Emotional Learning, Science & Social Studies, Numbers & Math, and Readiness & Writing. As a complete Pre-K curriculum, Get Set for School addresses each subject area throughout the course of overall instruction. Each lesson and activity corresponds to the specific Pre-K skills, standards, and benchmarks that Pre-K children need for success.

Lively Letters™ is a research-based and clinically-proven, multi-sensory reading program that turns plain, abstract letters and sounds into lively characters. Created by Nancy Telian, MS, CCC-SLP, forty-seven letters and letter combinations are embedded into colorful pictures that show students what to do with their mouths when making the letter sounds. Lively Letters™ uses story-based, multi-sensory approaches, students with different learning styles are able to use their strongest modes of learning to access and hold on to the information they need to acquire. The curriculum support struggling readers and students with various reading challenges such as dyslexia and other reading disabilities, speech an language disorders, memory weakness, and students learning English as a second language.

Kindergarten - Grade 5 Curriculum

The kindergarten - grade 5 curriculum is also aligned to Massachusetts Common Core Standards to best prepare students for the next grade level.

The English Language Arts curriculum at the elementary level centers around literacy. In order for students to be truly literate, students need to acquire wide-ranging knowledge of the world learned through a well-balanced curriculum.

Wonders 2020, published by McGraw-Hill is the primary resource for English Language Arts Instruction in grades kindergarten - grade 5. Wonders 2020 supports the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks by:

providing the resources necessary to provide explicit instruction in skills, including phonics and decoding,
embedding rich academic vocabulary and broad background knowledge,
presenting complex and challenging texts at their grade level and above, with extra support and scaffolding as needed,
including authentic texts balanced across genres, cultures, and time periods,
offering opportunities for independent study where students are provided additional choices to extend their reading, research areas of interest, and write about everything they’ve learned.

Differentiated instruction is also built into the Wonders 2020 program providing all students with the scaffolding or extensions they need to be an active part of their classroom community of learners.

English Language Learners are supported with instruction directly integrated into the core Wonders 2020 curriculum, providing both academic and social language acquisition. Resources are built to ensure equity of access for all students ranging from newcomers to those with advanced proficiency language development. Additionally, Wonders 2020 also sequences Social Emotional Learning within the program through three interrelated strands: approaches to learning, social and emotional development, and executive function.

As an attempt to close the reading gap and provide clear and systematic reading instruction, ECRI (Enhanced Core Reading Instruction) is used K-3 to strengthen foundational reading skills. The Enhancing Core Reading Instruction model increases the level of explicitness of core reading instruction by redesigning the core reading program to focus on critical reading content and provide deliberate and frequent practice opportunities. ECRI is a multi-tiered program (Tier 1 and Tier 2) featuring a series of teaching routines designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of reading instruction in kindergarten, first and second grade.

Self Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is a high yield / low lift evidence-based literacy approach for teaching writing in response to high quality texts. It provides a cohesive framework plus explicit instruction supported by SEL strategies to develop strong, independent writers. SRSD is NOT a curriculum. It is a framework that uses current curricular materials. K-5 staff have partnered with Providence College to receive professional development plus ongoing implementation support through the 2023-2024 school year. Professional Development is funded by the US Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research Division.

Finally, Wonders 2020 is also used to teach K-5 handwriting. However, in order to meet the developmental readiness of students, Kindergarten teachers and grade 1 teachers supplement the core curricula with Handwriting Without Tears where needed.

In addition to the core curriculum, Corrective Reading is also used to provide intensive direct instruction-based reading intervention for students reading below grade level. This Direct Instruction reading intervention program delivers tightly sequenced, carefully planned lessons that give struggling students the structure and practice necessary to become skilled, fluent readers and better learners.

The Math curriculum supports students in developing their conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application of math skills. The curriculum provides learning opportunities for students to explore and investigate the concept by using concrete objects, visual models, drawings, or representations to build their understanding. In the early grades they develop number sense while working with numbers in many ways. They learn a variety of strategies to solve problems and apply what they have learned about patterns in numbers . In the elementary grades, students use the most efficient and accurate way to solve a problem based on their understanding and knowledge of place value and properties of numbers. Students reach fluency by building understanding of mathematical concepts and through the basic computation facts, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

McGraw-Hill Reveal Math program is our primary resource for math instruction in grades K-5. Reveal Math is a balanced elementary math program, develops the problem solvers by incorporating both inquiry-focused and teacher-guided instructional strategies within each lesson. Reveal Math also offers STEM-focused units that highlight careers and real-world application of math to help students see the application of math as a tool to explore the world around them.

Additionally, Reveal Math integrates a social and emotional learning objective along with the math and language objectives of the lesson, addressing the CASEL Social and Emotional Learning competencies throughout each grade level.

As recipients of a 3-year grant from the One8 Foundation, we use ST Math as a supplement to the core curriculum. ST Math is a visual instructional program that leverages the brain's innate spatial-temporal reasoning ability to solve mathematical problems. Students are presented foundational concepts visually and solve puzzles through productive struggle. With visual learning, students are better equipped to tackle unfamiliar math problems, recognize patterns, and build conceptual understanding. Due to the positive experience and student response we have seen, we are actively pursuing a 3-year grant in hope to continue to provide students with sustained access to this program.

Science and engineering instructional resources include Mystery Science. Student engagement with science and technology/engineering is a critical emphasis that can only be achieved through quality curriculum and instruction. Teachers plan instruction that provides opportunities for students to investigate, problem-solve, argue, and discuss scientific phenomena to make sense of the world from their perspective. Learning experiences are hands-on and aligned to Next Generation Science Standards, supporting the Common Core Standards.

The Science curricula frames the purpose for learning by posing “Essential Questions”. Essential questions are designed to encourage further questioning and spark conversations. Students use exploration to help students understand the concepts more deeply, explain their reasoning, reflect and refine their thinking, and demonstrate their understanding.

Mystery Science features multimedia science units for K-5. Each lesson starts by posing a question commonly asked by kids, like "Do plants eat dirt?" or "Why are so many toys made out of plastic?". The units in Mystery Science can be used as an entire science curriculum or as a supplement to what teachers are already teaching. Our goal in science in the new school building is for teachers to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each resource to provide high quality instruction to all students.

Social Studies instruction is a balance of content instruction and reading strategy instruction. There are some lessons in which students learn deeply about historical events and really delve into the material through projects, close reading and meaningful activities. Social Studies related text are used to teach non-fiction, biographies are used to research historical events and people, instruction is focused on the processes of inquiry and research that are integral to a rich social science curriculum and the foundation for active and responsible citizenship. Teachers across the grade levels use various resources to teach Social Studies content to students including teacher written units and McGraw-Hill Impact Social Studies and Investigating History units for grade 5.

The elementary curriculum and core curricula are vertically aligned and will prepare students academically and social-emotionally for Northbridge Middle School.

Middle School

Staff at NMS are developing proficiency scales as a framework to align curriculum, instruction and defining student achievement. Proficiency scales is a rubric that is designed to identify expectations for students and inform lesson-planning while aligning grading practices. It improves teaching and learning by making the teaching and learning processes transparent—for teachers, their students, and parents and guardians.

The intent is for teachers to use the scales to plan what students need to know for mastery. Teachers will use them to differentiate instruction by providing direct instruction for students, opportunities for students to practice skills, deepening student understanding, etc. It also provides a framework to design common assessments for each unit or topic addressed. The following curricula resources are used:

In addition to teacher-written curriculum, StudySync is an available resource for the ELA department. StudySync a rigorous, student-centered curriculum that connects learning to students’ lives beyond the classroom. It enhances instruction with rich multimedia and digital tools and embeds scaffolds so ALL students reach their potential.

SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) instructional approach is embedded within the literacy units for teaching writing in response to high quality texts. SRSD provides a cohesive framework plus explicit instruction supported by SEL strategies to develop strong, independent writers. SRSD is NOT a curriculum. It is a framework that uses current curricular materials.

Reveal Math is also used at the Middle School level. The principles of Reveal Math derive from the latest research on how students learn best—through productive struggle, rich tasks, and mathematical discourse.

In addition, as recipients of the Accelerated Math grant for 2022-2023, the NMS Math department will incorporate Zearn will be utilized to assign missions as a "pre-teach" or "re-teach" to support differentiation. Through the use of pictures and interactive models, Zearn helps students make sense of math while providing built-in supports to enhance guided and independent practice.

This summer, science teachers from NMS will participate in a 4 day launch training to transition to the use of a new curriculum called OpenSciEd. OpenSciEd is a free downloadable curriculum that is high quality and backed by research. The materials and instruction align to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. As recipients of a grant provided by the One8 Foundation, teachers will work with trainers and consultants from Boston College to roll out the curriculum using phenomenon-based instruction over the next 3 years.

History Alive is standards-aligned social studies curriculum meets the criteria for national frameworks such as the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework. It also aligns with state standards across the United States. History Alive is designed to help students master the essential skills and knowledge. To this end, every unit includes primary sources and activities to make the lessons more inquiry-based and to help your students develop critical-thinking skills. History Alive also provides various print and online support tools including social studies textbooks, ELL support, text-to-speech, reading levels, in-line vocabulary, Spanish translations, closed captioning, and more to meet your needs and the unique learning needs students.

In addition, teachers have access to the Investigating History curriculum which is currently in development for grades 6 & 7. Investigating History is fully aligned to the Massachusetts 2018 History/Social Science Framework , engaging students with its content, practice, and literacy standards through an inquiry-based approach.

High School

The Northbridge High School Program of Studies programs and curricula offer a range of learning experiences in both the major disciplines and elective areas.

All curricular offerings are designed to challenge a student to excel to the best of his/her ability. The school recommends placement decisions based on standardized testing results, past academic performance, student interest, teacher recommendation, and parental request. Curricular offerings are developed in concert with state and national frameworks with a focus on technology integration, writing across the curriculum, and presentation. Four levels of coursework are offered: Advanced Placement, Honors, College Prep and Enrichment. All students are given a course expectation sheet for each course that includes grading rubrics, materials, and overall requirements in order for all students to meet with success.