spiraling curriculum

It seems to me that most curriculum are spiraling or scaffolding. We cannot jump into 8th grade Language Arts teaching the literary elements without the students first knowing how to read and becoming familiar with types of literature. Each year is comprised of reviewing skills taught in the past and then expanding upon that prior knowledge to reach new learning. This is why it is so important to have vertical alignment across the district. As a middle school teacher, I will have a very difficult time effectively teaching compound-complex sentence structure or dependent clauses if the students do not already understand what a complete sentence is and cannot identify nouns and verbs.