[Sprink]

My school is choosing a new reading series for grades K-5. We could use information from TEACHERS using a series, instead of from salemen.
Any recommendation (or ones to stay away from) ?

[freckleface]

Open Court! It's awful!

Our county began this year w/Scott Foresman and we are having a horrible time with it. Many errors in TE. Waaaaaaaaaay more stuff than you could ever do, and altho they say "pick and choose", you have to do some of all of it (Phonics, Spelling, Grammar in addition to the Reading) and it is taking ALL DAY to teach Reading! Sci, Health and SS have gone by the wayside. Beginning 2nd semester next week and they have changed many of the wordings mid-stream (story words called 'selection' words will now be called vocabulary words; words that were 'high-frequency' words are now something else I don't remember what)
The K teachers in my school are having an extremely hard time. Saxon Phonics - previously used but not allowed to use this year ('fidelity to the core program') - covered 69 sounds during K. SF covers 16 or so....
it's a mess.

[MrsM79]

Our district uses the Harcourt Reading series. It was reading, phonics, grammar and writing all included in the daily lessons. There is definitely much more that anyone could even get to, so you have to pick and choose and use only what you feel is most useful, however, they have a wonderful collection of leveled readers for guided reading groups, and the children really seem to enjoy them. Hope this helps!

[christina4062]

"Treasures" by MacMillan/McGraw-Hill.

It's a good series, based around the 5 key components of literacy. A typical lesson looks like this:

Begin with "Oral Language" for about 10 minutes. This is talking about the week's theme, making word webs, and asking questions.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics lead into your spelling lesson.

There are 5 to 6 new vocabulary words each week with daily activities.

Then comes the reading component. On Monday, you read a vocab selection, on Tuesday the main selection, on Wednesday you review the main selection and focus on one skill for comprehension, on Thursday you read a "paired" selection which goes along with the main selection and you use it to have students make connections between texts.

Then is the grammar and writing section.

Friday is a review day.

It comes with a TON of materials. Transparencies for everything, assessment books that are general and then aligned to your state test (so they practice test taking in your state's format and wording), CDs of stories, picture cards for story retell, letter cards for phonics lessons, letter sound cards... and a teacher's book about everything.

It's an overwhelming amount of resources, but you quickly get the feel for what you need and what you don't... and it's a nice "pick and choose" program.

It also comes with leveled readers for every story and the teacher's books are written for whole group instruction OR small group instruction using the leveled readers.

So far, we're liking the program, but this is our first year. Before, we were using a 10 year old series from HM... so anything was an improvement from that ancient series!

Good luck!


Christina

[soph]

We use Reading Street in pre-k to grade 3 in our building. We really like it a lot. This is the third year grade three has used it.

[lenarmc]

Don't even think about getting Open Court.
Since this is the only series that I've ever taught from, I have no other form of reference.

[firstgraderox]

is piloting both Harcourt StoryTown and Scott-Foresman Reading Street. I am piloting StoryTown and I am really liking it. Any new series is going to have "way more" than you could possibly fit in. I like that there are routines for everyday practice in oral language, oral reading, phonemic awareness, word wall...

The leveled readers are great. Each lesson has high frequency words that the students will see in the reading selections, leveled readers, practice books and center activities. There is a center-based conponent that I am picking a choosing. The great thing about being a pilot teacher is that we get all of the "bells and whistles".

The teacher using Scott-Foresman is really liking it as well. It will all come down to which company will give our distric the better deal.

Good Luck! Will you be able to try out a couple of the series before you choose? The last time we chose a new series for the district we oly had "samples" to go by......We chose Scholastic Literacy Place without trying it out and ended up hating it! I hope your school takes its time to choose carefully!

This year, my school bought Reading Street and we are also using the interventions of Early Reading Intervention for Kindergarten and the My Sidewalks interventions for A-D. You are so right about the typos. The regular classroom teachers some like it but there are alot of stuff you have to makeor write on the board before you teach the lesson. I love the My Sidewalks. I do not have reinvent the wheel for each class or grade in interventions. The company says the two programs are correlated but we are having a hard time with the correlations.
If you are looking for a reading series that also has an intervention compoenent for your tier 2 and 3 students, then go with reading street.

[MrChapp]

We used Scott Foresman's Reading Street last year. I loved it. Some teachers complained that there was too much, but I didn't have a problem getting it all in. I didn't follow the daily schedule exactly though. Some days there was too much, but I was usually able to fit it in on Thursday or Friday when the workload seemed smaller.

Another benefit of Reading Street for us was that there was a Michigan version of the series. We received testing books that resembled parts of our state tests and had tips on lining everything up with state curriculum.

We are using harcourts Storytown and it' as awful as your S-F series. All "research based" but drill, drill ,drill. BORING!