Lake Superior School District approves new K-5 reading curriculum

Lake Superior School District will send a new reading curriculum into kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms this fall after the school board unanimously approved Fishtank on April 14. The change follows a yearlong trial at William Kelley Elementary and Minnehaha Elementary, where staff and students tested the program before the board signed off on it.

The district is pairing Fishtank with Functional Phonics + Morphology, the foundational-skills program already in use. Together, the two programs are meant to cover both halves of reading instruction: decoding and word recognition on one side, and comprehension, vocabulary, language structure and context on the other. Literacy Lead Pam Carlson and William Kelley School Principal and Curriculum Director Dan Johnson presented the plan to the board, using Scarborough’s Reading Rope to show how the strands fit together.

That approach is central to why the board approved the change without dissent. Lake Superior is not just replacing a book list. It is trying to build a more coherent literacy system that matches Minnesota’s READ Act, which has forced districts to re-examine how they teach reading, train staff and choose classroom materials. The state says districts must use evidence-based curriculum and intervention materials at each grade level, and teachers responsible for reading instruction must receive approved training. Districts and charter schools also must file a local literacy plan every year by June 15.

For parents, the most visible change will be in the earliest grades, where reading time will no longer be limited to phonics drills alone. Students in kindergarten through grade 5 will work through reading, writing, discussion, projects and assessments built into Fishtank, while phonics and morphology lessons continue alongside it. Carlson said the trial brought positive feedback from teachers and students, with older elementary students especially engaged by the chance to dig into why words mean what they do.

The district’s leaders are betting that this combination will produce more than smoother lesson plans. The READ Act’s stated goal is for every Minnesota child to read at or above grade level every year, beginning in kindergarten, and it specifically calls for support for multilingual learners and students receiving special education services. The measures Lake Superior will use to judge the rollout are built into that mandate and into the curriculum itself: regular assessments, teacher training, and the district’s yearly literacy plan. For families in Two Harbors, Silver Bay and the rest of Lake County, the test will come in the daily classroom experience this fall, when the youngest readers begin learning from a different playbook.