Building Knowledge

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OUR MISSION

Our mission is to advance student comprehension by equipping teachers with knowledge-building, time-efficient lessons that integrate the science of reading and provide essential support for language learners.

OUR APPROACH

We believe that knowledge is the foundation of curiosity, creativity, and innovation. It enables students to ask thoughtful questions and to evaluate answers critically. Knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding and an essential—yet often overlooked—component of reading comprehension.

Students grow their background knowledge by developing word knowledge, world knowledge, and an understanding of text structures. Our resources are thoughtfully designed around seven guiding principles that support this growth and inspire a lifelong love of learning.

01 Educational Equity

Regardless of a student’s socioeconomic background or the language spoken at home, units of study should be designed with the assumption that students may have limited background knowledge. Essential vocabulary and foundational concepts should be intentionally developed throughout the sequence of lessons.


02 Less is More

Elementary teachers have limited time to devote to knowledge-building subjects such as science and social studies.  Teachers need short lessons that fit within their schedules and help students gain and retain essential knowledge.


03 Integration

Lessons within a unit of study must be integrated with the application of disciplinary literacy skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.


04 Content then Standards

Content drives standard selection. Students use the skills described in the standards to learn the content.


05 Inquiry

Both teacher and student-generated questions are central to student learning. 

06 Evaluating Sources

Students need opportunities to evaluate primary and secondary sources as they engage in inquiry. 

07 Knowledge is Transferable

A student’s personal knowledge provides a framework for organizing incoming information and guides them as they read through any text.  Knowledge helps improve reading comprehension across all subjects.

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A Knowledge-Building Solution to Improve Reading Comprehension

School Districts across the country are seeing the same challenge: while many students are learning to decode, too many struggle to understand what they read. The Science of Reading makes this clear—reading comprehension depends on strong vocabulary, language development, and background knowledge. When students lack knowledge of the world, comprehension suffers across all subjects.


The Background Knowledge Project was designed to address this gap.

A Research-Aligned Approach

Grounded in the Science of Reading, our lessons intentionally build the knowledge and language that power comprehension. Research consistently shows that knowledge-rich subjects like social studies play a critical role in developing academic vocabulary, oral language, and conceptual understanding—key drivers of long-term reading success.


Our first offering,  Stories That Shape Us: K–2 History Lessons, integrates literacy and social studies instruction in a way that is practical, efficient, and impactful.

Designed for Real Classrooms

Stories That Shape Us provides ready-to-use lessons that fit seamlessly into elementary schedules while strengthening reading outcomes districtwide.

  • Explicit vocabulary and language development embedded in every lesson

  • Coherent, cumulative content that systematically builds knowledge over time

  • Aligned to literacy goals without adding instructional burden

  • Minimal prep and teacher-friendly materials

Lessons are intentionally designed to support students who need the most support—without limiting access for any learner.

Program Scope

  • Kindergarten: 60 lessons (30 minutes each)

  • Grade 1: 65 lessons (40 minutes each)

  • Grade 2: 70 lessons (40 minutes each)


Each lesson introduces students to meaningful historical content while strengthening foundational language skills and academic vocabulary that transfer directly to reading comprehension.

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Be Smart.

BeeHydrated!

Be Smart. Beehydrated! is an educational program for elementary aged students developed by Kendrick Fincher Hydration for Life. This program was created to be a resource for teachers to seamlessly integrate life-saving and healthy concepts and activities into existing lessons across the curriculum.



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ARTICLES

Every parent loves to see his or her children happy. So do we!

An Introduction to Cognitive Load Theory

By Jamie Redcay • January 5, 2026
Without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind. – Dr Vicki Likourezos, The Education Hub (March 3, 2021) Cognitive load theory helps us to understand how people generally learn and store new information, and the types of instructional practices that best support learning. It draws on the characteristics of working memory and long-term memory and the relationship between them to explain how people learn. Cognitive load theory emerged in the late 1980s from the work of John Sweller and his colleagues. The theory is based on our knowledge of the structure and processes of the human mind, known as human cognitive architecture. Human cognitive architecture helps us understand how we learn, think, and solve problems. It is considered to be a natural information processing system that generates various procedures designed to reduce cognitive load and facilitate the acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge held in long-term memory.

Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension

By Jamie Redcay • January 2, 2026
Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension – Hugh W. Catts (American Educator, Winter 2021–22) It is February 2015, and I am at a national conference listening to a panel present the results of their research on improving reading comprehension. Several members of the panel, like myself and a few others in the room, are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. This $120 million program supported six interconnected research teams in their efforts to improve reading achievement in the United States.1 Educators and policymakers had for some time been concerned about the performance of American children on tests of reading achievement. Over the last 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at the proficient level on the reading subtest of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).2 This assessment is administered biennially to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students (and every four years to 12th-graders) from across the nation. Somewhat better, though still troubling, levels of performance have also been reported on state-based reading tests, administered annually starting in third grade. The Reading for Understanding Initiative was intended to jump-start instruction in reading comprehension and significantly improve reading achievement on state and national assessments. In fact, it was described by program officials as the “moonshot” for reading comprehension.

Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

By Jason Redcay • December 24, 2025
Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Adam Tyner & Sarah Kabourek, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute (September 24, 2020) Even as phonics battles rage in the realm of primary reading and with two-thirds of American fourth and eighth graders failing to read proficiently, another tussle has been with us for ages regarding how best to develop the vital elements of reading ability that go beyond decoding skills and phonemic awareness. The dominant view is that the way to improve America’s abysmal elementary reading outcomes is for schools to spend more time on literacy instruction. Many schools provide a “literacy block” that can stretch to more than two hours per day, much of it allocated to efforts to develop reading skills such as “finding the main idea,” and “determining the author’s perspective.” But it doesn’t seem to be working.