[champ]

Our district is looking to adopt a new reading series. Right now we are looking at Storytown and Treasures reading series. I would love your thoughts on these series. Are they teacher friendly? Are the stories engaging? Are the materials easy to use? Are the assessments sound? Any comments about these programs would be so helpful! Thanks in advance.

[SnackNapRead]

My district uses Treasures and the only real complaint I have about it is that the teacher's edition has so much STUFF on each page that I have to use Post Its to cover all the writing ~ otherwise I can't focus on what I want to teach/read when I glance down at it. I usually end up setting it down and just going off a student book!

[jillms]

My district adopted Treasures for the current school year. Although there are many positives, the assessments are a huge negative. Many teachers are starting to rewrite them.

[SnackNapRead]

ah ya, forgot about the assessments. i use the assessment generator cd instead of the grey book.

[mrs_c]

If you're looking for engaging stories and sound assessments, DO NOT USE STORYTOWN. None of the stories are engaging, and many of the assessments are awful. One of our tests asked the question, "How could you get a shirt with Froggy on it?" Well, at the beginning of the story is said that Froggy was the school mascot. At the very end, it said if you'd like to join the soccer team, go to a certain teacher and you'd get your shirt for the team. The students were supposed to figure out that if you joined the soccer team, you would get a soccer shirt, and the shirt would have the school mascot on it, which was Froggy.

Just stupid. There are so many times where the students wouldn't know the answers to the test unless they looked in the pictures; i.e., the TEXT doesn't have the answers.

The program IS very teacher friendly, though. That is, if you mean "teacher friendly" as in "completely scripted". It's boring. The students don't like it, and neither do the teachers.

Basically, I can't tell you anything about the other reading series you're asking about, but I can tell you that Storytown is useless.

Hope this helps! Haha!

[_HOotie]

This is our school's first year using Treasures. I love the stories, all the stuf they give you, however, it is very overwhelming. The assessments are HORRIBLE. For example: one story talks about the different planets. There is a part about meteoroids being a large as a house, as large as a mountain, or very small etc... It also said they are called shooting stars when they come to Earth. The test question asked Meteoroids are A. can be miles wide B. something something C. something something D. are often called shooting stars when they come to Earth. This question is confusing especially to 3rd graders.
We have the whole ELA and the Grammar is terrible, the tests do not test the skills practiced and they are very short. The spelling is not too great. The bubble test directions state that ONE word is spelled correctly in each set. Then they will give words like thrown, throne, throughn, trong, that is TWO correct words in that set, and this goes on and on.
If you are looking at Treasures, insist on seeing all the assessments, they were not shown to us during our adoption time. I hope this helps.
The best thing in my opinion is the Instructional Navigator and the Student Navigator. All the teacher's mannuals, transparencies, EVERYTHING they give you in hard copy is on the cd. The student navigator is the whole student book on cd. These are wonderful.

[champ]

Thanks for all your help. I appreciate the comments. I will pass these on to our committee. If there are any more keep them coming. Our committee makes their decision on Nov. 13.

[dwfl]

I was on that same committee, and I looked at each series through the lens of how they taught comprehension. I felt like the Treasures did the best job of asking higher order questions and teaching strategies. We adopted it, and everything that has been said is so true- there is so much stuff, you need a year or two to figure it all out, and you need to decide up front what you want to use and leave out. And the assessments make me think every kid is going to fail the FCAT! Which of course can't be true (right?? right??) sometimes I even don't know what the answer is. But they do teach them to go back and reread, and think critically. So now I'm thinking that the assessments assess test taking strategies, and my old fashioned running records assess reading.
All that being said, I do think the series is good- it covers grammar, which many people weren't teaching at all, spelling, reading, and writing- which I sort of meld with my L.C. approach. If I were you, I'd look at each series with the question that is important to you in mind: how well does it teach ____? and really read through several complete lesson structures to get a gist of it! Good luck- it's a big task!!!