1st Quarter Reading Comprehension Pacing

I have receieved many questions about how I do my Reading Comprehension Instruction using Scott Foresman Reading Street(RS). After taking a Reading class last summer, I realized that the way we were using Reading Street was not helping our learners. Through this class, I learned that it is better to focus on specific skills and strategies each week, which RS DOES, but the sequencing was a little off for our County Pacing Guides, which tell us which quarter we have to teach each skill. (Confused yet?? Hang in there...it gets better!)

My 2nd Grade Team decided we would try out team planning last year, so I was responsible for doing our whole group comprehension lessons since I had taken that class. Since I am Grade Level Chair, I also had to come up with the pacing we would use that matched up with the County Pacing Guides. Last year, I did a LOT of research on how to teach all these different skills and strategies. We made it through the first year OK, and I really think our students benefited! It was actually STANDARDS based planning as opposed to just going by what the Basal said we had to do with each story.

This summer, when I started putting together the curriculum map, I did keep a lot of things the same, BUT, of course...our standards changed! So now we have a few "extra" things that we didn't have last year (mainly in writing/grammar), but I am hoping that things will be a LOT easier this year.

Here is what I have come up with for how we will approach our Reading Comprehension Instruction using Virginia's Standards of Learning (otherwise known as SOLs...yep.). I will be posting more about the activities as I start planning for them.

-Week 1: Following Directions (see this post about some ideas I have for that) and Teacher's Choice of "Getting to Know You" activities I will be doing my Morning Anouncements Companion Pack as well!  I will be participating in the BIG TPT BTS sale, so you can hop over to my store, put it on your wishlist, then check it out on 8/12 or 8/13!

-Week 2:  Character and Setting Story Elements (just those two) using "Iris and Walter" from RS

-Week 3:  Summarization using "Henry and Mudge" books ("Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night" from RS)

-Week 4:  Summarization using "Tara and Tiree" from RS

-Week 5:  Nonfiction Text Features using "Exploring Space with an Astronaut" from RS

-Week 6:  Nonfiction Text Features using "A Walk in the Desert" from RS

-Week 7:  Realism/Fantasy using "The Strongest One" from RS

-Week 8:  Review Realism/Fantasy, Introduce Sequencing using "Ronald Morgan" from RS

-Week 9/End of Quarter:  Sequencing with "Turtle's Race with Beaver" from RS


You may be wondering...what do they use from Reading Street besides the stories?  I have gone through the Practice Workbooks and found which pages correspond to the skill/strategy that we are studying.  They may not be for the same story all the time, but that's OK, we can still use them for extra practice.  We also still use the High Frequency Words and Vocabulary Words from each story and focus on them throughout the week using the Practice Book pages and other activities.  I need to be better about seeing if the leveled readers will work each week--but we also try to use the leveled readers that go along with each story during small group instruction, but I have to be careful since I don't do each story in the exact order.  Sometimes the stories aren't at an appropriate level for my groups, so I will get something from Reading A-Z instead.

At the end of each week, I have made a test to go along with each skill/strategy to assess student understanding.  In the weekly test, there is a High Frequency Words page (the same as RS), a Comprehension page (which is occasionally a Fresh Read, but mostly just something I've made up), and a Grammar page. 

At the end of the quarter, we take a County-Wide Benchmark Assessment.  We currently use Interactive Achievement, which...I'm still up in the air about, even though we've used it for 3 years.  It has some quirks that none of us really like, but that's a WHOLE other story.

I will be addressing each of these weekly skills/strategies in upcoming posts on my blog mixed in with a few other posts that I am preparing about Back to School.  I hope you join me! :)

(P.S.  Tonight is the weekly webcast on wholebrainteaching.com at 8pm eastern.  This week's topic, "WBT: Week 1 Goals!" Ready for school to start? Discover what to shoot for by the end of your first WBT week!)