How an EL Education Powered by Kiddom Day is Built

EL Education, Powered by Kiddom is built in blocks. A K–8 guide to every structural component — what each one is for and the minutes it takes in class.

Kiddom

September 23, 2026

Start with the shape of the day

EL Education, Powered by Kiddom, is not one block of time. It is two, and then one.

In kindergarten through grade 2, a class gets an hour of Module Lessons and, where schools run them, a second hour of Labs. In grades 3–5, the second hour becomes the Additional Language and Literacy Block, usually just called the ALL Block. In grades 6–8, the second hour disappears and the first one shrinks to forty-five minutes.

That is the single most useful thing to know before you open the curriculum, because almost every question a new teacher has — where does phonics go, when do I meet with small groups, why is there no independent reading time in my schedule — is really a question about which block the work lives in.

The literacy day, K–8.

All bars on one scale: the full width is 180 minutes.

K–2

Module Lessons60 min

Labs60 min

Skills Block60 min

Unlock ELD30 min

60 core · Labs optional · 210 with every block
3–5

Module Lessons60 min

ALL Block60 min

Unlock ELD30 min

120 core · Unlock Phonics sits inside the ALL Block, not beside it
6–8

Module Lessons45 min

45 total · language supports are inside the lesson

Module Lessons, the spine
The second hour
Standalone programs

Grades 3–5 are the only band where EL describes the curriculum as two hours of instruction rather than one. The shrink from 120 minutes to 45 between grade 5 and grade 6 is the largest structural change in the K–8 sequence.

The rest of this piece walks down the structure in the order you actually meet it: the year, then the module, then the hour, then the minute. Everything below is the 2025 Edition for K–5 and the 2019 Edition for 6–8, as published in Kiddom.

The year is four modules — but K–5 picks them

Every grade teaches four modules. Each module is eight weeks and holds three units. That part is the same from kindergarten to grade 8.

What changed in the 2025 Edition is that K–5 now ships six modules and asks the school to teach four of them. Modules 1 and 4 are fixed. Modules 2 and 3 fork, and the school picks a lane for the year: Innovator, which is STEM and STEAM, or Explorer, which is humanities and social studies. The two lanes carry different topics and different books, and identical standards coverage.

Grade 3’s six modules, and the fork in the middle.

The Power of Reading Module 1 · fixed

Why people read, how they get books, and what stands in the way. 40 lessons across 8 weeks.
Frogs, or Language Module 2 · you choose

2N Innovator: The Wonderful World of Frogs. 2E Explorer: The Wide World of Language.
Trash, or Money Module 3 · you choose

3N Innovator: The Waste Cycle: How We Make Trash. 3E Explorer: The Decisions We Make About Money.
The Water Challenge Module 4 · fixed

Enough clean water for everyone.

EL Education Language Arts 2025 Edition, Grade 3, as the module list appears in Kiddom. The N and E suffixes mark the Innovator and Explorer options; a class teaches one of each pair.

Inside a module.Three units, running roughly three weeks, two weeks and three weeks. Grade 3’s Module 1 splits its 40 lessons as 13, 12 and 15. Each unit carries two assessments, and the module ends with a performance task in Unit 3.

Why eight weeks.Students stay with one set of texts on one topic long enough to become genuinely knowledgeable about it. That is the content-based literacy bet: the deeper the content knowledge, the more a student can read, say and write about it — and, EL argues, the better they read about new content too.

Inside the hour: Opening, Work Time, Closing

Every Module Lesson in every grade has the same three parts. An Opening that gets students into the work. A Work Time of two or three lettered segments that carries the reading, writing and talking. A Closing that lands the learning — and, from grade 6 up, is renamed Closing and Assessment, because by then it usually collects something.

What changes across K–8 is not the shape. It is where the minutes go.

Pick a band, or scroll on for all three.

Kindergarten · Module 1 · Unit 1 · Lesson 1

Investigate and Describe to Become a Toy Expert

60 min
Read-aloud
Conversation Cues

Opening20 minEngage the Learner
Work Time A10 minIdentify Description Words
Work Time B25 minBuild Background Language
Closing5 minReflect on Learning

60 minutes

The longest Opening in the K–8 sequence. Five-year-olds need a third of the hour to get into the text, and Work Time B is playtime with the classroom toys — which is where the formative assessment happens.

What the Opening is for.Reading the learning targets aloud, hearing a story, getting the topic in the room. It is not a warm-up in the arithmetic sense; it is the on-ramp into a text students could not read alone.

What the Closing is for.Five minutes, two students share, everyone uses the sentence frame. Short by design: at this age the reflection is oral, and it is the teacher’s last look at who has the language and who does not.

Grade 3 · Module 1 · Unit 1 · Lesson 3

Recount Stories and Discuss Access to Books

60 min
Waiting for the Biblioburro
Note-catcher

Opening20 minEngage the Learner
Work Time A10 minBuild Language for Recounting
Work Time B20 minRecount the Story
Closing10 minClass Discussion
Homework—Independent reading

60 minutes, plus reading at home

Same hour as kindergarten, redistributed. The Closing has doubled to ten minutes and carries a formative assessment, and homework has appeared — independent reading starts in Unit 1, Lesson 2 and runs all year.

The shift from K–2.Work Time is no longer the whole story. Ten of the sixty minutes now go to a discussion the teacher scores, because from grade 3 the speaking and listening standards are formally assessed.

And the hour after this one.This lesson does not try to differentiate. It cannot — every student is in the same grade-level text. The differentiation happens in the ALL Block, later the same day.

Grade 6 · Module 1 · Unit 2 · Lesson 3

Close Reading Jigsaw: “Cronus” and “Medusa”

45 min
Jigsaw
Entrance ticket

Opening5 minEngage the Learner
Work Time A10 minReview Summary Writing
Work Time B20 minJigsaw Close Read
Closing10 minJigsaw Share
Homework—Preread the next excerpt

45 minutes, plus a preread at home

The Opening has collapsed from twenty minutes to five. That is the whole story of 6–8: the on-ramp is gone, because the reading that used to happen in class now happens the night before.

Where the missing time went.Homework carries a preread, and class time is spent on a ten-to-fifteen minute reread of an excerpt rather than a first encounter. The lesson assumes students arrive having already met the text.

Closing and Assessment.The name change is real. In this lesson the Opening entrance ticket and the Work Time revision are both logged as Ongoing Assessment, and the Closing is where the jigsaw groups report what they found.

Everything wrapped around the agenda

The agenda above is maybe a fifth of what is on a lesson page. The rest is the part that takes the time on a Sunday night, and it is worth knowing what each piece is actually for before you read all of it.

A Module Lesson page, top to bottom.

Lesson Summary

Three or four sentences. Read this first; it is the only place the lesson explains itself in plain language.
Daily Learning Targets

Written as “I can…” because students read them aloud. From 2025, one target in each lesson is a Language Focus.
Focus and Supporting Standards

Focus standards drive the learning targets and the module assessments. Supporting standards are practiced but not the point of the day.
Ongoing Assessment

Names which moment in the agenda produces evidence, and against which standard. This is the list to check before you decide what to collect.
Guidance and Supports

Teaching Notes, differentiation, and the purpose-and-alignment note explaining why the lesson is built the way it is. The longest section, and the one worth skimming rather than reading.
Materials and Preparation

Required Texts you must source separately, versus everything the curriculum provides. Check this a week out, not the night before.
Handouts and Editable Student Materials

The note-catchers and task sheets, flagged for printing, plus editable versions in Kiddom.
Presentations

A slide deck per lesson. Browse it as-is, or toggle Edit and change it.

As the components appear on a Kiddom lesson page. Grades 6–8 use a slightly shorter set — Learning Targets rather than Daily Learning Targets, and Teaching Notes in place of Guidance and Supports.

Kiddom Assistant, while you are finding your way around

A module is eight weeks of material and a lesson page is long. The first year with EL Education, Powered by Kiddom, is mostly a navigation problem: knowing what a component is for, where a thread starts, and what today assumes you already did.

Kiddom Assistant reads the curriculum in front of you, not the open web. Open a lesson, a unit or a module and ask it to explain what you are looking at — what the ALL Block components are, why this Language Dive is here, which standard the Closing assesses, what to prepare for tomorrow.

It answers from the actual EL text on that page, so what comes back is grounded in your curriculum rather than a general account of how literacy blocks tend to work. That is the difference that matters when you are trying to implement the thing faithfully.

What is this lesson assuming students already did?
Explain the ALL Block rotations for this unit.
Which standards does this unit formally assess?
What do I need to prepare for tomorrow?
Where does this module’s performance task start?

More prompts, organized by what you are trying to do: What You Can Actually Ask Kiddom Assistant.

The second hour, and why it changes

Module Lessons keep every student in the same grade-level text. That is deliberate, and it is also why a second hour exists: it is where the curriculum does the things a whole -class lesson cannot.

In K–2 that hour is play. In 3–5 it is practice and small groups. The change between them is not a change of philosophy — it tracks what six-year-olds and ten-year-olds actually need.

K–2: Labs, one hour.

Four of the five lab types run in each module — Create, Engineer, Explore, Imagine, Research.

Launch whole group

Students meet the four Labs of the module. No rotation yet; this stage exists so the choices later mean something.
Practice small group · 2 × 20 min

Students work in two different Labs, twenty minutes each. First contact with the materials.
Extend whole group, then small group · 2 × 20 min

Two days of whole-group work clarifying what good work looks like, then the same two-Lab rotation with harder tasks or new materials.
Choice and Challenge specialization

Students pick a Lab, build a product, get feedback, revise it, and share it. They rotate between their specialization and the Imagine Lab — in every module but the fourth.

Labs are optional and ship as their own teacher guide, but they are the band’s oral-language engine: collaboration, academic vocabulary and habits of character, in a setting where five- and six-year-olds are allowed to play.

3–5: the ALL Block, one hour.

Grade 3, Module 2E, Unit 1, Week 2, Day 4 — a representative day.

Opening4 minEngage the Learner
Rotation 118 min—
Rotation 218 min—
Rotation 318 min—

58 minutes

Each student does all three rotations every day. Which one they are in at any moment depends on where their group is in the cycle.

Teacher-led
Small Group Mini Lessons

Differentiated four ways: practice, practice with support, more challenge, or a focus on English language development.

18 min
Independent
Accountable Independent Reading

A self-selected book or article. Sometimes tied to the module topic to build knowledge, sometimes free choice to build the habit.

18 min
Independent
Task Cards

Practice on skills from the previous Module Lessons unit — and the accountability for the independent reading.

18 min

Across a unit, the small-group mini lessons cycle through four components, two days each: Reading and Speaking Fluency; Additional Work with Complex Text; Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics; and Word Study and Vocabulary. An eight-week module gets only six weeks of ALL Block lessons — the missing two weeks are deliberate flex time for reteaching, conferring and assessment.

The day that is not a rotation.Day 1 of Weeks 1 and 2 is a Student-Engaged Assessment Plan. Students look at their own results from the previous unit’s assessment, then choose which Task Cards to work on. It is the structural answer to “when do students see their own data.”

Why 6–8 has no second hour.The supports that live in the second hour in K–5 — language work, differentiation, independent reading accountability — move inside the 45-minute lesson in middle school, through Language Dives, Conversation Cues, tiered scaffolds and independent research reading set as homework.

The foundational skills lane

Neither Module Lessons nor the second hour teaches systematic phonics. That is its own lane — two standalone programs — and it runs on its own clock: students are placed by assessment rather than by grade, and they move when they are ready.

K–2: Reading Foundations Skills Block.One hour a day of structured phonics, built on Dr. Linnea Ehri’s Phase Theory. The 2024 Edition is organized by microphases and cycles rather than by grade, and instruction starts at Middle Pre-Alphabetic so it covers the kindergarten standards from the bottom.

Three benchmarks set the groups: beginning of year in the first two weeks, middle of year after Module 2, and end of year in the last two weeks. Between them, each cycle ends in a Cycle Practice or Cycle Check rather than a daily assessment. The target is that every student can read grade-level text independently by the end of second grade.

3–5: Unlock Phonics.Twenty to forty minutes for students still building decoding, and it is semi-asynchronous — video instruction the student works through alone, which is what makes it viable for an older learner who would not sit through a whole-class phonics lesson.

Seven microphases and forty-nine series. Each week is two sessions plus one Series Check: pass and move on, or drop into Encore & Reset for review and spiral practice. It runs inside the ALL Block, replacing the Task Cards rotation, so it costs no extra time in the schedule. Teachers review the Series Checks in a weekly conference.

The assessment spine

One more structure runs through all of it, and it is the one that makes the eight weeks add up to something: a fixed assessment rhythm you can find in any module, in any grade, without looking it up.

What gets collected, and when.

Ongoing Assessment

Inside most lessons

An entrance ticket, a note-catcher, a discussion. Named in the lesson page and tagged to a standard, so you know what it is evidence of. Grade 3’s Module 1 has these in roughly twenty of its forty lessons.
Mid-Unit Assessment

Around the midpoint of each unit

The first formal check. Often two or three parts covering different standards — a reading response and a grammar section, or a written plan and a discussion.
End of Unit Assessment

Last lesson of each unit

The summative check for that unit’s standards. In K–2 it is frequently split into Part 1 and Part 2 across two days, because the tasks are read aloud.
Performance Task

End of Unit 3, closing the module

Not another test. Students synthesize all three units into authentic work — Grade 3 Module 1 ends with a Class Library and a Book Tour, where students write books, hang them on the wall, and read them aloud to guests.
Celebration of Learning

The final lesson, K–5

The work goes public. A Weather Expo, a Trains Class Book, a Book Tour. The audience is the point.

Each grade 3–5 module carries three mid-unit and three end-of-unit assessments, plus the performance task. Teachers score them with unit checklists and an Assessment Scoring Sheet, and students get the results back — which is what the ALL Block Day 1 reflection then runs on.

What does not change from kindergarten to grade 8

The blocks change, the minutes change, the names on the components change. These do not. A teacher moving from grade 2 to grade 7 would recognize every one of them.

The Three Dimensions of Student Achievement

Mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality work. The reason performance tasks and Celebrations of Learning are structural rather than optional.
Learning targets in student language

Every lesson, every grade, written as “I can…” and unpacked with students rather than posted at them.
Language Dives

A structured conversation that takes one complex sentence apart and puts it back together. Kindergarten through grade 8, same routine, harder sentences.
Conversation Cues

Four goals, from “encourage all students to talk and be understood” up to “think with others to expand the conversation.” Introduced in Unit 1 and used all year.
Habits of character

Named per module and taught explicitly — collaboration, perseverance, respect — and assessed alongside the academic work, not instead of it.
Read–Think–Talk–Write

EL’s own name for the cycle a lesson runs. It is the clearest single description of why the agenda is shaped the way it is.

Read the block, then the lesson

Almost everything confusing about EL Education, Powered by Kiddom, in the first month resolves once you know which block a thing belongs to. Phonics is not missing from the Module Lesson; it is in the Skills Block. Differentiation is not missing from grade 4; it is in the ALL Block. The twenty minutes of Opening did not vanish in grade 6; it moved to homework.

The architecture is consistent enough that once you can see it in one grade, you can find it in any of them. That is what makes it teachable across a K–8 building rather than one classroom at a time.

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Structure and timings in this article are drawn from EL Education, Powered by Kiddom — Language Arts 2025 Edition (K–5) and 2019 Edition (6–8) — and from the EL Education, Powered by Kiddom program brochures. Lesson timings are taken from the named example lessons; individual lessons vary. State editions — California, New York, Ohio, Michigan — follow the same architecture with different module content. EL Education® and Painted Essay® are registered trademarks of their respective owners.