Brain First Learning for an AI World
5th Grade Literacy Lab
5th Grade Literacy Lab: A Science of Reading Comprehension Framework & Curriculum
Two-thirds of students enter fifth grade reading below proficiency1 — and the gap underneath is executive function. Literacy Lab is core fifth-grade instruction that teaches that executive function to every student, covering all the ELA anchor standards and bridging reading and writing gaps before middle school.
The Shared Gap
Bridging the Upper Elementary Literacy Gap for Every Fifth Grader
Every fifth grader is carrying the same secret: middle school scares them.
Yet each student feels alone in their worry. They’ve heard the stories: Lockers. Changing classes. Teachers who don’t know their names…
But the gap isn’t only theirs — it’s yours, too. You carry your own stressors on their behalf. You want to close the literacy gap and send every student to middle school with authentic confidence — but you’re at a loss; you know what not to do. But in all of your training, no one ever showed you what you should do.
I know, because I was handed the same certificate. I was fully trained in elementary literacy — and only realized this same deficit in myself, years later.
And it’s not just me — or you. In a national survey, only 11% of K–2 and special education teachers said they felt completely prepared to teach reading after finishing their training programs.2 Neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg puts it bluntly: with few exceptions, teachers are simply not taught to teach reading — and they “don’t know what they don’t know.”3
The gap was built into the system before any of us ever stepped into a classroom!
So Literacy Lab calls out the elephant in the room — for the fifth grader dreading the change, and for the teacher who was never shown how. Then it makes a promise to both: this year, we’re going on an adventure together to get ready for middle school.
Meet Literacy Lab
What Is Literacy Lab?
Literacy Lab is a full-year, fifth-grade ELA curriculum built on executive function. It covers 100% of the K–12 ELA anchor standards — the transferable reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language skills behind them — starting where most programs never do: by teaching the underlying self-management and thinking skills that make reading, writing, and learning possible in the first place.
It doesn’t compete with your ELA block. It is your ELA block.
It’s core instruction for every fifth grader — not a pull-out, not an intervention. Strong readers go deeper. Students carrying gaps finally get the foundation no one ever built. Same room, same lessons, every student moving forward — because differentiation is the natural outcome when students can apply strategies to their own work.
By June, the change is visible. Students who arrived overwhelmed can organize their thinking, comprehend what they read, and write about what they’ve learned. The gaps that threatened to follow them for years into the future stop here! And the foundation carries them into middle school, high school, and beyond.
Literacy Lab at a Glance
- Grade
- 5
- Length
- Full year
- Lessons
- 18 foundation lessons (weekly, 1st semester) + 4 ELA Maps (transferable literacy skills, 2nd semester)
- Delivery
- Whole-class core (Tier 1) — replaces your ELA / literacy block
- Teacher prep
- Minimal — turn-key
- Materials
- For students: digital, workbook, or both
Implementation paths — from a full five-day model to blended schedules — plus minutes-per-week and lesson pacing — Literacy Lab Pacing Guide →
The Foundation
An Executive Function Framework: Building a Literacy Infrastructure That Works
The Learning Success Pyramid illustrates the foundation learning depends on. Confidence comes first, creating the emotional stability the brain needs to engage. Executive function comes next, organizing and managing incoming information. Learning sits at the top as the natural result of these two foundational layers working together.
But The System approaches learning upside down: we throw content at students from the top, down — standards, textbooks, tests, grades — and hope information sticks! Meanwhile, we ignore the foundation underneath… and when learning has nothing to stand on, it doesn’t happen.
THE LEARNING SUCCESS PYRAMID
Without the foundation, learning doesn’t stick.
Traditional instruction throws information at students from the top, down. SOAR builds learning infrastructure from the bottom, up.
When the foundation is solid, students can:
- Manage their attention.
- Organize information.
- Regulate their own thinking.
Suddenly, everything at the top of the pyramid becomes possible. Comprehension becomes automatic. Writing becomes accessible.
Without it: Students sit in front of nonfiction text and feel overwhelmed. Too much information. No way to organize it. Can’t focus. Can’t think. Can’t write about what they read. The gap grows wider.
The invisible layers — confidence and executive function — can be taught. They are not fixed traits. Confidence can be built. Executive function can be learned. And once they are built, we don’t just close a gap. We open infinite possibilities for our students.
That’s what SOAR®’s 5th Grade Literacy Lab does. It makes the invisible visible, names those foundational layers, and teaches them explicitly so your students can access everything else.
The Curriculum
How Literacy Lab Works
First, let’s define “literacy.” Literacy is more than the sum of reading, writing, and language arts. It’s the full package: the competence to take in new information, process it, and express oneself effectively, across many contexts.
And literacy is powered by executive function.
SOAR Literacy Lab is a framework for teaching the explicit executive function skills that fuel literacy, bridge gaps, and prepare all students for middle school. And while Literacy Lab confidently covers all the ELA standards, it’s an unconventional twist on “English class”… because it starts by building the first two layers of the success pyramid.
Confidence. In the first lesson (about one week), students focus on identifying strengths and superpowers — theirs and their peers’. The process doesn’t look like “traditional ELA,” but it’s the most powerful week of the entire curriculum, because it’s:
- Giving students a shared vocabulary to identify and name previously invisible strengths;
- Empowering students to authentically believe in themselves, which triggers intrinsic motivation; and
- Building a classroom culture that celebrates each individual’s unique strengths — a strengths-centered culture that becomes an upward spiral of encouragement, minimizing behavior issues and erasing bullying.
In the lessons that follow, students dive deeper into self-exploration — identifying their priorities and goals, and learning how to set and achieve them.
Executive function skills. Next, students learn to organize their materials, their space, and their time. A few weeks in, it may seem like we’ve forgotten this is an ELA course. But we’re laying a strong, solid foundation for the strategic learning that follows.
Strategic learning. Now the top of the pyramid comes within reach. With confidence and executive function in place, students learn to read nonfiction for meaning, write through the thinking process, and study strategically — finally able to run the very strategies that “English class” was always after.
What’s in the box:
- Eighteen lessons that build the executive function foundation — organization, focus, planning, self-regulation — taught as the integrated system they are
- Comprehension strategies optimized for nonfiction reading, with the cognitive groundwork laid before the reading lesson ever arrives
- Writing instruction focused on the thinking process, built on the inquiry strategy that runs through the entire curriculum
- Four ELA maps carrying the transferable reading and writing skills of the standards — all the way through twelfth grade
- Built-in audio narration* — every lesson can be read aloud to students through the software
- SEL support tools — coping cards, an empathy map, and other ready-to-use resources for the social-emotional side of the middle school transition
- Teacher Presentation Tool: slides, scripts, activities, and assessments — nothing to invent from scratch
*In the student software. Student materials are available in two formats — software or workbook. Many schools use both.
What’s not in the box:
- Phonics instruction
- Decoding intervention
- Leveled readers
Students who genuinely need phonics and decoding instruction will be identified by the miscue analysis. Those materials are available everywhere.
This curriculum focuses on the comprehension, writing, executive-function, and learning infrastructure that most fifth-grade ELA programs assume students already have.
The cover won’t say “ELA.” It says “learning and soft skills.” That’s not a packaging oversight — they are the skills that power literacy. The cover names the foundation; the standards name the outcome. This curriculum connects them.
And because the skills are transferable, they carry the majority of the grade-level ELA standards for grades 6–12 as written. These aren’t fifth-grade skills that expire in June. They’re the same skills your students will be graded on for the next seven years, built now.
Read the Miscues
Why Phonics Alone Isn’t Enough: The Science of Reading Comprehension
Phonics matters. Decoding matters.
But reading isn’t phonics. Reading is comprehension — and comprehension takes more than decoding words. By fifth grade, many struggling readers need more: help integrating word recognition, language, comprehension, and self-monitoring into one coordinated reading process.
Look closely, and the struggle usually follows one of two patterns. In the first, decoding succeeds but meaning fails — the student gets the word, then loses the sentence. In the second, decoding itself stumbles — but because the student is over-applying phonics rules to a word that doesn't follow them, not because of a gap in phonics knowledge. Either way, they sound like they don't know their phonics.
Most often, what they don't know is how to integrate phonics with comprehension.
Don’t take my word for it. Your running records already hold the answer.
In my own clinical and instructional work across hundreds of miscue analyses, I’ve found the same pattern in well over 80% of readers with low fluency: they sound rough when they read aloud — but when I check comprehension, it’s far stronger than their fluency scores would predict. When I then analyze the miscues, they trace back to overreliance on phonics — the student is leaning so hard on decoding that meaning-making can’t keep up.
Most often, that prescription to “double-down on phonics”… is the one thing they don’t need.
Of course, before you accept that diagnosis, check it. You’re already doing running records — take one step further and analyze the miscues. I show you exactly how in a free video on my YouTube channel: twenty minutes, and you’ll know how to determine which camp each reader is in. The payoff goes beyond placement.
Share a miscue analysis with the student and you build their metacognition — they finally understand what their brain does when they read. Share it with parents and you’ll watch years of worry lift.
And for the students whose miscues show a genuine phonics gap? Get them phonics support — sincerely. Those programs exist everywhere, and those students deserve them. That was never the gap SOAR fills. The gap SOAR fills is the one almost nobody is addressing: the comprehension infrastructure everyone is missing.
Phonics opens the door. Comprehension walks through it.
SOAR teaches students the executive function strategies that enable comprehension — strategies delivered using SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development), the same evidence-based model that makes learning stick. Students internalize not just what to do, but how to regulate their own thinking as they read.
And the research points in the same direction; even when teacher training works, it moves decoding, only. A 2023 study of 512 classroom teachers found that teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy predicted students’ foundational skills scores — but not their comprehension scores.4
Comprehension needs something more. Reading researchers Laurie Cutting and Hollis Scarborough — creator of the Reading Rope — have identified a key part of that something — executive function: working memory, planning, organization, self-monitoring. The exact skills SOAR Literacy Lab teaches explicitly.5
SCARBOROUGH’S READING ROPE
Skilled reading is many strands woven into one.
Executive function is the hand that weaves these strands into skilled, fluent reading.
The Reading Rope shows those processes in granular detail — decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, language structure — each an active strand. But strands don’t weave themselves.
Executive function is the hand that weaves the rope — braiding the strands into reading comprehension and learning.
The Standards
Meeting 100% of K–12 ELA Anchor Standards in 5th Grade
SOAR covers 100% of the anchor standards for K–12 ELA — and a full alignment shows exactly where each skill is taught and applied. We just teach them starting at fifth grade.
Here’s how: The anchor standards define the endpoints — what students should be able to do by the end of twelfth grade.
SOAR takes those endpoints and flips them into teachable skills, delivered through the study skills framework using SRSD.
So instead of waiting until tenth grade to teach “analyze how point of view shapes a text,” fifth graders learn the comprehension strategy that makes that analysis possible.
Instead of waiting until eleventh grade to teach “develop and strengthen writing through revision,” fifth graders learn the thinking process behind revision — how to regulate their own writing development.
Many students arrive at middle school with gaps in reading comprehension and writing, whose source has been invisible. SOAR makes those gaps visible, names the strategies, and teaches students to bridge them in fifth grade — so they can start middle school with authentic confidence!
Where Standards Live
Nonfiction Reading Strategies and Writing Workshops for 5th Grade
Nonfiction is where the standards are. And it’s where schools have the fewest resources.
Your fifth graders need to read informational text, understand it, and write about it. But most literacy materials center on narrative — stories, picture books, guided reading levels. The nonfiction side of the standards is exactly where the shelf goes empty. And what does exist tends to dress itself up as nonfiction instruction without offering strategies students can actually repeat.
Here’s how SOAR builds it — and why it works differently than a strategy-a-week program.
Nine of the eighteen lessons teach students how to learn — the cognitive skills for accessing, organizing, and processing information. That’s not a warm-up before the “real” literacy instruction. It is the comprehension infrastructure being built, lesson by lesson, before students ever realize that’s what’s happening.
Then comes the reading lesson. One lesson, dedicated entirely to reading nonfiction — and every lesson before it has been feeding it. The strategies it teaches transform comprehension the moment students use them, because by the time they arrive, the foundation can carry them. This is the difference between handing a student a strategy and handing them a strategy their brain is ready to run.
The writing instruction works the same way. One dedicated writing lesson, built on the unifying strategy that runs through the entire curriculum: inquiry — asking the right questions. Every lesson before it has been reinforcing that strategy, so when students reach writing, they aren’t learning a new skill from scratch. They’re aiming a skill they’ve been sharpening all semester at the page. Presentations follow the same thread: organizing ideas into clear, concise packets — first for an audience of readers, then for an audience in the room.
All of it is delivered through SRSD — so students internalize not only the strategies, but how to regulate their own thinking as they read and write.
And in second semester, the ELA maps take it deeper. The maps carry the reading and writing skills of the standards — through twelfth grade — in a form a fifth grader can follow, as a guide. Literacy Lab emphasizes nonfiction because that’s where upper-elementary gaps tend to show up most clearly — while the Fiction Story Map gives students a transferable structure for literature analysis.
The Proof
Does It Work? The Evidence
Literacy Lab teaches reading and writing the way the research says works: explicitly. When students are shown how to plan, draft, and revise — rather than simply assigned writing — writing quality climbs from the 50th percentile to about the 79th.6 When struggling readers receive explicit comprehension-strategy instruction — even students with learning disabilities, where gains are notoriously hard to move — comprehension jumps 18 to 24 percentile points.7 And the strategy model Literacy Lab is built on — SRSD — is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse.8
The broader SOAR curriculum — the same approach, now in 5,100+ schools across 53 countries — has the track record to match.
After a school-wide SOAR implementation, one district measured a full-point GPA increase across its entire student body — its own data, shared with us.
The Risk Is Ours, Not Yours
SOAR backs Literacy Lab with a written guarantee: a half-point GPA increase, 30% fewer missing assignments, and measurably stronger student confidence — or your money back, when used with fidelity. See the guarantee →
“The lessons are broken down and made relevant and practical for kids.”
— Teacher, grades 5–6 study-skills group
“Homework is getting done faster and there is much less fighting in our household!”
— Nancy V., elementary parent
“Once I learned how to get control over what I was supposed to learn before a test and what to do on a test, I was so much more confident!”
— Sachi I., student
The Adventure
Introducing Literacy Lab: A Fifth Grade Learning Adventure to Discover Their Superpowers
You made your fifth graders a promise: this year, we’re going on an adventure together — to get you ready.
That’s Literacy Lab. Not another subject. Not another block on the schedule. It doesn’t compete with your ELA time — it is your ELA time: a place where students experiment with how their own brains learn, because what works in here has real value out there.
First semester builds the foundation. Students move through the eighteen lessons (one per week) in order — the first focus is to build confidence, then to build the executive function skills that bring order to their time, space, materials, and thinking. Taught together, as the integrated system they are. This is the brain architecture everything else stands on.
It may not look like a traditional literature unit at first, but students are building the inquiry, organization, language, and self-regulation skills that make later reading and writing work. And for the students carrying reading and writing gaps, this is where those gaps start to close — because the foundation that was always missing is finally being built.
Second semester puts it to work. Students apply that architecture to deeper reading and writing with the ELA Maps:
- Fiction Story Map — covers literature standards
- Nonfiction Notes Map — covers “reading for information” standards
- Writing Roadmap — covers writing and language standards
- Speaking & Listening Map — covers speaking and listening standards
The maps carry the transferable reading and writing skills that will carry students through middle school, high school, and beyond. One set of skills per map… learn them once, and they’ll navigate every form of communication needed into the future!
And every week, students document their journey. One session per week is dedicated to portfolio development — students capturing their own growth, starting with a baseline reflection on themselves as readers, writers, and learners.
The adventure has checkpoints where they are prompted to look back and see the distance. Confidence isn’t told to them. It’s reflected back to them, in their own work.
And the adventure has destinations. A mid-year “level up” presentation at the end of first semester. A gallery at the end of the year — students presenting the evidence of what they’ve learned, how they’ve grown, and who they’ve become… right before they graduate.
They don’t walk into middle school hoping they’re ready. They walk in with proof!
And you? You’re not handed a script to perform. You’re the expedition guide, with the route already mapped — the curriculum carries the expertise, so you can carry the experience.
Turn-Key — and You’re Not on Your Own
Literacy Lab arrives turn-key. The lessons, presentation tools, activities, and assessments are made. The curriculum supplies the plan. You create the experience. See the 5th Grade Literacy Lab pacing guide →
New for 2026–27: up to four live implementation webinars are planned — two in August–September 2026 and two in December 2026–January 2027 — for hands-on training and your questions about running Literacy Lab. Contact us for details →
The Payoff
A Middle School Transition Curriculum That Builds Readiness
This is the real payoff.
In fifth grade, your students have one teacher. One classroom. One organizational system. One way of asking for help. You manage the logistics. You keep them organized. You keep them focused.
Then middle school arrives. Six or seven teachers. Six or seven different expectations. Six or seven different ways of organizing assignments, asking for help, managing deadlines. Suddenly, the student who was fine in your classroom is drowning.
Unless they’re not.
Unless they’ve spent fifth grade building executive function skills: organization, planning, self-regulation, focus, the ability to manage information across multiple contexts, and the confidence that they can think their way through a problem instead of waiting for someone to solve it for them.
That’s what Literacy Lab does. It builds those skills in fifth grade — invisibly, through the study skills framework — so by the time they walk into six different classrooms, those skills are automatic. Invisible. Just how they think.
They cross the bridge with proof in hand — portfolio, “level-up” presentations, visible growth — not terrified. Ready.
Looking Ahead
For an AI World
Your fifth graders will graduate into a world saturated with AI.
Not eventually. Now. Generative AI is already reshaping how information is accessed, how writing is produced, how thinking is outsourced. By the time your students reach high school, AI won’t be a novelty — it’ll be the default tool for everything.
That changes what matters.
Picture a fifth grader handed an AI that answers almost any question instantly. The skill that matters isn’t getting the answer — it’s knowing whether the answer is any good. Can she evaluate the information? Ask a sharper question? Catch what the AI got wrong and think the problem through herself? That’s the difference between a student who uses AI and a student AI uses.
In an AI world, comprehension matters more, not less. When anyone can generate text, the ability to read critically, to question, to understand deeply — that becomes the irreplaceable skill. When AI can write, the ability to think through a problem before writing, to regulate your own thinking process, to revise with intention — that becomes what separates capable learners from overwhelmed ones.
The human skills AI can’t replicate are the ones Literacy Lab teaches. Independent thinking. Comprehension. The ability to learn for yourself. Executive function — the infrastructure that makes all of that possible.
Build those skills now, in fifth grade. Not as a reaction to AI. As a preparation for it. Your students will be ready not just for middle school, but for a world where the ability to think independently is the most valuable skill they can have.
Why SOAR
Why SOAR
5,100+ schools across 53 countries use SOAR.
I’m a certified K–12 reading and learning specialist with 25+ years in the field, and the author of the bestselling study skills curriculum.
But here’s the credential that matters most: I was you.
I taught elementary with zero reading materials and zero writing materials. I had a certificate that said I was qualified — and years later, I realized my training had taught me what not to do, but never explicitly showed me what I should do. I was standing in front of students who needed help, and the system had left me unprepared.
That’s when everything changed. I was in grad school, discouraged, telling my husband I didn’t want to be there. And he said something that struck like lightning: “Maybe you hate teaching reading because you don’t know how to do it.” He was right. The next morning, I changed my major to reading. Within a month, I knew it was the best decision of my life.
Because I discovered I wasn’t alone. Teachers everywhere were carrying the same gap — trained in what not to do, never equipped with what to do. And when I finally learned how to teach reading, I spent years building a curriculum that would give other teachers what I never had: not just a method, but the materials, the pacing, the confidence, and the framework to actually do it.
That’s why this curriculum covers 100% of the anchor standards for K–12. It was built before the standards existed, from the ground up, by someone who’d lived the teacher’s desperation. The standards confirmed what the curriculum already knew: reading and writing aren’t separate from executive function. They depend on it.
SOAR Literacy Lab is for fifth-grade teachers who are ready to stop improvising and start building.
About the Author
Susan Kruger Winter, M.Ed., is a certified K–12 reading and learning specialist and the founder of SOAR Learning. She authored SOAR Study Skills — the best-selling study skills book since its 2007 launch — and built the SOAR curriculum now used in 5,100+ schools across 53 countries. She also developed the Brain Circuit model, a framework for identifying the root causes of learning challenges and building effective detours around them.
The Promise
Making the Invisible Visible
Your fifth graders arrive carrying invisible literacy gaps that have been passed through elementary school like a hot potato.
Those gaps aren’t just in reading comprehension. They’re in executive function: Organization. Focus. The ability to regulate their own thinking. The confidence that they can learn.
SOAR Literacy Lab makes those invisible layers visible.
It names them. It teaches them. It builds them explicitly so your students don’t just survive middle school — they walk in ready. Organized. Focused. Confident. Thinking like readers and writers instead of guessing.
The foundation becomes solid. And once it is, everything at the top of the pyramid becomes possible.
Your students can read nonfiction and understand it. They can write and think through it. They can manage six different teachers, six different expectations, six different ways of asking for help. They can learn independently.
That’s what happens when you build from the ground up instead of throwing content at the top.
That’s what SOAR Literacy Lab does.
The demo includes the pacing guide, standards alignment, and sample student materials. Click above to see the software in action, get a digital review copy of the student book, and start a free 14-day trial — no credit card needed.
More for Educators
Start Here·What Is SOAR?·Why SOAR Works·Executive Function·RTI/MTSS·Solutions by Focus·Pricing & Options
Research Sources
1 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2024 Reading Assessment, Grade 4. 31% of fourth-graders scored at or above NAEP Proficient — roughly two-thirds scored below it. (NAEP notes its Proficient level is not equivalent to grade-level proficiency.) National Center for Education Statistics / The Nation’s Report Card. nationsreportcard.gov ↩
2 EdWeek Research Center (2019). Early Reading Instruction: Results of a National Survey. In a survey of 674 K–2 and special education teachers, 11% reported feeling “completely prepared” to teach early reading after their preservice programs. edweek.org ↩
3 Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the Speed of Sight. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-08065-6. ↩
4 Porter, S. B., Odegard, T. N., & Oslund, E. A. (2023). Effects of teacher knowledge of early reading on students’ gains in reading foundational skills and comprehension. Reading and Writing, Springer Nature. Teacher knowledge predicted students’ foundational-skills gains but not their comprehension gains. link.springer.com ↩
5 Cutting, L. E., & Scarborough, H. S. (2006). Prediction of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, language proficiency, and other cognitive skills can depend on how comprehension is measured. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(3), 277–299. doi.org ↩
6 Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 445–476. Reported effect size 0.82 for explicit strategy instruction on writing quality; plain-language translation: a move from the 50th to roughly the 79th percentile. ↩
7 Berkeley, S., Scruggs, T. E., & Mastropieri, M. A. (2010). Reading comprehension instruction for students with learning disabilities, 1995–2006: A meta-analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 31(6), 423–436. Reported effect sizes 0.94 (visually dependent) and 1.18 (auditory/language-dependent) strategies; plain-language translation: an 18- to 24-percentile-point jump for students with learning disabilities. ↩
8 Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris, K. R., & Graham, S.) is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse; Harris et al. (2012) randomized controlled trial, Elementary School Journal; SRSD is in use in approximately 10,000 U.S. classrooms. ↩