Think of your children as newborn birds: each feather starts as soft down—great for providing warmth but little else. With nurturing and growth, the downy feathers are replaced by more mature feathers that resist weather. As our children age, they continue to shed old feathers and gain new ones. With each progression, specialized wing feathers develop.
Eventually, the wing feathers are complete and the young birds are ready for flight. With the ability—and confidence—to fly, our young birds can follow their wings to land wherever may suit them best.
Each mature wing feather exists because the downy feathers came before them, and then the next set. Such natural progressions—one feature or skill building upon the one before—are vital to life-long growth and success. Without these progressions, flight can be difficult and choices limited.
Learning is also a natural progression for our fledglings. Basic skills they learn as toddlers and as primary students, set the foundation for growth as adolescents, teenagers and young adults. This natural progression of learning is what the national education standards are all about.
National education standards were developed by groups of teachers in the four core disciplines: Math, Language Arts/English, Science, and Social Studies. These standards and their related Learning Objectives provide guidelines for educators to ensure that students are learning what are considered essential skills. Just like feathers, they build upon what came before. By using these as guidelines, teaching parents and other teachers help each student create a foundation for achieving success in the next level of learning. They also provide teaching maps that can prevent gaps in learning.
The Learning Objectives embedded in our interactive Individual Learning Plan (ILP) come from three sets of curriculum documents that cover each of the four core academic areas: Language Arts & Reading, Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science. These Learning Objectives are aligned to, consistent with, and supportive of most state achievement/education standards.
To ensure alignment with national standards and expectations, the Learning Objectives are also aligned with the CAT-6 (Terra-Nova) test, the standards of the National Council for Teachers of English, the National Science Standards, and the standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
The Learning Objectives were originally developed by the Galena City School District in Alaska for use by their classroom teachers and homeschooling parents. For our use, some minor modifications have been made to the objectives, changing state-specific statements to broader, more inclusive statements.