What grade do you teach? Here is a piece of a post I posted earlier this summer on another board regarding the Comprehension Toolkit. I used The Comprehension Toolkit this (past) year. We got through all of the units except Synthesis before the school year was over. It is STW with "floaties", (I love that description).I recommended it to my step-daughter who just finished her first year of teaching 3rd grade and was not happy with her reading program.
As Judy said, the lessons are very, very long. It might take 3 or more days to get through some lessons if you have a 45 minutes block of time for whole group reading instruction. At first, I though it was me because I've used many lessons from STW in the past. Finally, I realized it wasn't me; that the lessons really were long. Although my 5th graders loved the lessons, eventually their little eyes would glaze over; they couldn't handle a 60-90 minute lesson either. I learned to break each lesson into more doable chunks. One thing I really liked was that I had a very, very, wide range of ability levels in my class this year; from high functioning mentally disabled, to slow learner, to average, to gifted. Reading levels spread from 2nd grade to 11th grade. By carefully pairing students and with me working with the lowest and highest readers, every student in class was able to participate at their own level. My lowest student was so proud to be "with" the class and my highest student was not bored. Often, I was able to take the "big idea" from our morning reading and have the students apply what we did to our science and social studies lessons in the afternoon. One of the drawbacks that frustrated me was that you only receive one copy of each book. Many of the lessons ask students to buddy up and share a copy of the text, so that part was difficult if you don't have multiple copies of the books. You don't need a class set, but you do need about 5-6 copies of some books, depending on how big each of your groups are. I liked the Source Book of Short Text, all non-fiction.you make copies for the class. Some of the extra pieces at the end of the book are leveled: easy, medium, more challenging. My fifth graders were much happier and more productive having their own copy of the text to mark up. I ended up taping a lot of the practice pieces together (magazine style) to give the students a better idea of what they were looking at. Some of the pieces are fairly long-5-6 pages or so. (These pieces are from magazines such as Time For Kids, National Geographic for Kids, etc.) Will I use it again next year? I think so, my students are, unfortunately, not exposed to this method of reading comprehension in previous grades, nor will they be exposed to it in middle school. They are used to basal series instruction. Next year I'm sure I will tweak and change things here and there, I always do, but this year I wanted to get a feel for The Toolkit as the authors present it. I hope this helps. Parker ----- Original Message ----- From: "GRISTINA, KRISTIN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 7:05 PM Subject: [MOSAIC] comprehension tool kit > Does anybody NOT like the comprehension tool kit? > My worry is that it's going to be too "packaged"- meaning the lessons are going to be too simplistic and not truly catering towards the needs of diverse learners. > I'm just wondering if anyone has anything negative to say about it. I have no experience with it. > Kristin > > _______________________________________________ > Mosaic mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. > > Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. > > _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
