Reading & Writing
Literacy & Reading Instruction:
Amplify CKLA
At Great Lakes Academy, our literacy curriculum is built on Amplify CKLA (Core Knowledge Language Arts), a comprehensive reading program grounded in the Science of Reading. The curriculum ensures all students develop both strong foundational decoding skills and the deep background knowledge required for strong reading comprehension.
Key Pillars of the Program:
- Foundational Skills: Explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency, giving students the essential tools to become confident readers.
- Knowledge-Based Units: Reading comprehension relies heavily on vocabulary and world knowledge. Students explore rich history, science, literature, and culture topics, expanding their vocabulary while practicing close reading skills.
- Personalized & Adaptive Practice: Through digital companion tools (such as Boost Reading), students engage with adaptive activities that match their individual reading levels, reinforcing classroom instruction.
- Data-Driven Assessment: Regular, embedded assessments help teachers track individual growth and target instruction to support every child’s unique needs.
KinderCorner: A comprehensive kindergarten program based on research indicating that young children learn best when material is delivered holistically rather than in isolation. Using a thematic approach to learning, KinderCorner addresses all key developmental domains for early learners. KinderCorner helps children make sense of the world around them, fostering the development of children’s language, literacy, math, and interpersonal and self-help skills and science and social studies concepts. KinderCorner consists of sixteen thematic units that are designed to relate to children’s lives, interests, and surroundings and introduce them to concepts that are then explored and reviewed through concrete, integrated, theme-related activities. KinderCorner specifically targets language and literacy development through the discussion of thematic concepts to promote the children’s phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and oral-language development. These activities include interactive story reading and storytelling, action songs and rhymes, and verbal guessing games. Each day, children choose learning labs and engage in reflection activities to promote their problem-solving skills. Students also read KinderCorner concepts-of-print books, which helps them to develop phonics and other readingreadiness skills.
Reading Roots: Reading Roots 4th Edition is a ninety-minute comprehensive program that targets the needs of beginning readers. Reading Roots is a research-based beginning-reading program that provides a strong base for successful reading through systematic phonics instruction supported by decodable stories, along with instruction in fluency and comprehension. Reading Roots also fosters students’ love of reading by providing rich literature experiences, extensive oral-language development, and thematically focused writing instruction. These objectives are embedded in a fast-paced, engaging, and highly effective instructional process. Students are assessed and regrouped according to their reading level every quarter to ensure that they receive the most focused instruction. Reading Roots is built around forty-eight lessons. Separated into four levels, it supports concept development in oral-language development, phonemic awareness, phonics, word skills, fluency, and writing. Second and third grade nonreaders can be regrouped into Reading Roots classes. Reading Roots provides a strong base for successful reading due to its emphasis on systematic phonics instruction through FastTrack Phonics. This phonics instruction is supported by decodable stories, and instruction in fluency and comprehension.
Reading Wings: Reading Wings 4th Edition is a research-based reading curriculum that provides ninety-minute daily lessons over a period of five days and targets the needs of students reading on a second- through eigth-grade level who have successfully learned to decode but need to develop more sophisticated reading skills. To ensure that students become proficient readers, Reading Wings uses Success for All’s core instructional structures to target vocabulary development, reading comprehension, fluency, orallanguage development, and written expression by providing students ample opportunities with both narrative and expository text.Targeted Treasure Hunts, a key component of the Reading Wings program, provides instruction focused on targeted reading skills and strategies. All the instruction accompanying each five- or six-day lesson cycle centers around a narrative or expository trade book or basal selection, allowing for background building, specific and technical vocabulary development, utilization of targeted skills, team discussion, relevant writing activities, and assessment. Reading Wings further supports reading comprehension through the Savvy Reader. The Savvy Reader provides intensive, engaging introductions to each of the four core comprehension strategies—clarifying, questioning, predicting, and summarizing. Additional Savvy Reader lessons provide comprehension strategy instruction throughout the year, and this instruction is reinforced through Targeted Treasure Hunts.
Non-Discrimination Policy
The teachers and staff at Great Lakes Academy stand TOGETHER against racism and police brutality.
We embrace, as a school community, the continued important conversations that surround all the issues we are currently facing.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Other Programs
Great Lakes Academy
46312 Woodward Ave. • Pontiac, MI 48342
Phone: 248‑334‑6434 • Fax: 248‑334‑6457
School Hours
Monday – Friday
Full Day: 8:00 am – 3:30 pm
Early Release: 8:00 am – 2:30 pm
Half Day: 8:00 am – 12:00 pm

