SF Reading Street Woes

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If you don't teach Language Arts using Reading Street...this post may not interest you.  I had some questions about how I have adapted the Reading Street Series to meet my needs instructionally, so I'm trying to explain that here...

Let me tell you a little bit of background of my journey with Scott Foresman's Reading Street.

4 years ago, I was new to my district, teaching 1st grade, and my district had just purchased Reading Street as our new reading series. I was completely overwhelmed.  I was just trying to keep my head above the water.  There was SO MUCH STUFF!  I did not like the Spelling Curriculum.  The transition from the previous K Language Arts curriculum to this new 1st Grade SF Reading Street curriculum was ROUGH for my little ones, especially in Spelling.  In my opinion, it was not developmentally appropriate.  After that year, I decided that, next year, I was going to use differentiated Spelling (i.e. Words Their Way).

Welllll.....my disctrict redistricted and because of seniority, I was sent away to a different school to a different grade--Second Grade.  Now, I was the new girl on the block and wasn't in a position to try to do something completly new on my own.  Plus, I was now in a new grade level, new curriculum, so again, I was just trying to keep my head above the water.  I ended up getting pregnant that year as well and didn't really have the energy to do much else than what the series prescribed.  The Spelling Curriculum wasn't SO bad in Second Grade, but I still wasn't fond of it.

The following year, administration made it CLEAR that we all had to be doing the exact same lessons at the exact same time across ALL subjects, so once again I had to use the Spelling words, weekly comprehension tests, you name it--even though I wasn't too convinced that this was truly making my students proficient in Reading or Spelling, for that matter. 

Well, last summer, I attended a Summer Reading Academy taught by an amazing instructor who discouraged us from using Reading Street altogether!  Our Director of Elementary Education at the School Board Office said that it was OK for us to just use it as a "Resource" and that we were welcome to use whatever materials we did and did not want to use from the series, as long as we were meeting our State Standards.  LUCKILY, both my administrators were also in this class, so they heard all this, too.  They were completely on board for us changing the way we were doing things.  So much so, that the whole school had to move to doing Differentiated Spelling through Word Sorts using "Word Sorts and More."  In the Academy, we were also encouraged to focus more on the Comprehension Skills and Strategies than the weekly stories.  HALLELUJAH!!!! 

Up to this point, I felt like I had to place too much emphasis on the stories so that the students could pass the weekly story test and that I wasn't really teaching them the Comprehension Skills and Strategies.  I hardly ever got to use mentor texts in my lessons because we would have to listen to the same story every day for a week.  Even when we did that, I STILL had kids who were not passing those weekly comprehension tests.

Soooo...as Grade Level Chair, I had to design the curriculum map for our Grade Level.  I decided then and there after my class that I would be planning our curriculum for Reading based on comprehension skills and strategies.  What I did was chose a skill/strategy for the week, assigned a story from the Reading Street book to help demonstrate that skill/strategy, then every other day of the week, use a different picture book as a mentor text or an activity to teach/practice the skills.  Then, I created a Teacher Made Test on each of these weekly skills that would assess how well they knew the SKILL/STRATEGY and not the story of the week.  I feel SO MUCH better about my reading instruction this year.  Is it perfect?  NO!  Am I going to change some things for next year?  YES! 

As an example, here's what we did for the first 9 Weeks of School...

Week 1--Teacher's Choice: Back to School Activities
Week 2--"Iris and Walter": Story Elements--Character/Setting, Visualizing
Week 3--"Henry and Mudge": Summarizing using Character/Setting, Visualizing
Week 4--"Exploring Space":  Nonfiction Text Features, Predicting
Week 5--"A Walk in the Desert":  Predicting
Week 6--"The Strongest One": Realism/Fantasy, Special Features in Plays
Week 7--"Tara and Tiree":  Sequencing
Week 8--"Ronald Morgan":  Sequencing

We used other stories during the week to also demonstrate these skills, but it is good for the students to have their own copy of a story to read each week.  Most of these stories are also AR stories, so if I really wanted to see if they were comprehending the story, I would check that during computer lab by having everyone take an AR test.  Each week, we had a Comprehension Test that had a page of HFW from the Reading Street story, a page of comprehension questions, and a page of grammar.  Unfortunately, ALL of my tests were lost when my jump drive broke, but I'm hoping that I have paper copies of everything, and that maybe some of my team still has the electronic copies of everything so I can rebuild my electronic files.

Well, I hope this helps you understand a little bit more of how my classroom uses Reading Street.  If you have any questions, feel free to comment! :)  I will try to post more about what we're going to do for next year as I figure it out.