Teacher Support / Blog / Fishtank Fall Updates: For Teachers, By Teachers

Fishtank Fall Updates: For Teachers, By Teachers

September 24, 2025

We are thrilled to announce a fresh set of updates designed to support you and your students this fall. Our team is thrilled to share our latest enhancements to our curriculum, website, and Student Platform.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

We Completed Our Full K-12 ELA Curriculum!

It's a truly momentous time for our ELA curriculum team, and we are so excited to share this news with you. We now have a complete K-12 ELA curriculum! With the recent release of Grade 12 ELA Unit 5, our ELA materials are now comprehensive, covering kindergarten through Grade 12, and provide a complete and cohesive instructional path for all your students.

Our Newest Unit: Tragicomic Truths in Fun Home

The final piece of our ELA puzzle, Grade 12 ELA Unit 5: Tragicomic Truths: Exploring Identity, Family, and Grief in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, is now live! This unit offers a powerful exploration of identity, memory, and loss through the lens of a modern graphic memoir. Students will analyze how Alison Bechdel uses literary allusions and visual storytelling to craft a poignant and complex narrative.

The unit also features supporting texts, including poems by Ocean Vuong and Elizabeth Bishop, that deepen students’ understanding of key themes. The culminating Performance Task invites students to create their own coming-of-age narrative, empowering them to tell their own stories in a comic, poem, or written memoir.

Fun Home serves as an ideal capstone experience, asking graduating seniors to grapple with mature themes through innovative storytelling formats, preparing them for the complex texts they'll encounter in college and beyond.

Live Assignments & Real-Time Feedback

At Fishtank Learning, we believe the best solutions come from the educators who use our curriculum daily. We trust teacher expertise to help guide us in the work we do. Our new Live Assignments feature, now available for Fishtank Students in Grades 6-12, is a direct result of this principle. During a recent pilot, a teacher approached us with a challenge: the need to view students' writing in real-time. We listened, and our team created a tool that makes it possible.

With Live Assignments, you'll see a live typing indicator right next to a student's name as soon as they begin to type. This provides a bird’s-eye view of your entire classroom, allowing you to offer targeted, real-time feedback without needing to walk around and peer over every shoulder. It’s a tool built to save you time and help you connect with your students exactly when they need it.

More Exciting Fall Updates

We've made other significant strides this month to improve your experience on our site:

New Post-Unit Survey: We've added a new feature for Plus users! You'll now find a Post-Unit Survey link at the bottom of the left-hand unit navigation for all new ELA units. This makes it easier than ever to share your thoughts and help us build better tools. Coming soon to Fishtank Math!

Foundational Skills Tags: Foundational skills tags are now live across our K-8 ELA curriculum. You can quickly identify and track key skills, helping you better support your students’ literacy development.

New 1st Grade Math Unit: We're excited to announce that another fantastic Grade 1 unit is LIVE! This unit, Adding and Subtracting Within 20, is a new course for the 2025-26 school year. In one cool Lesson, students will build number sense around doubles as a strategy to add within 20 by using a storybook, Two of Everything, and a Rekenrek tool to connect the math concept to students' storytelling and kinesthetic learning strengths.

Math Refinements: We've released significant revisions for Grades 1, 2, 7, and 8 Math, with a focus on providing more clarity and guidance for teachers. Our Grade 2 Math course has undergone refinements to enhance instructional clarity and coherence. The first three units are now available, with more to follow on a rolling basis.

For middle school, a suite of enhancements is rolling out to Grade 7 and 8 Math units, including enhanced Anchor Problems, clear facilitation guidance, and new Warm-Ups and Spiral Review questions to support intellectual preparation.

Here is an example of a new Anchor Problem from Grade 8 Unit 1 Lesson 13. The Anchor Problems offer topics that are more relevant to students’ lives and current real-world issues. Warm-Ups, Faciliation Guides, and Spiral Reviews are included with Fishtank Plus.

We are so grateful for your ongoing support as we work to provide teachers with the high-quality, openly licensed curriculum they deserve. We invite you to explore our complete K-12 ELA scope and sequence, delve into the new Fun Home unit, and discover our recent Math enhancements. We can’t wait to for you to use them!

Want a deeper look into our units yourself? Access thousands of standards-aligned, engaging lesson plans for free with a Fishtank Learning account.