I am responding to the question of how to use basals in the class. I teach 6th grade inclusion and was told I must use it in class. Our school uses Scott Foresman. Since we have students at such varying levels in terms of decoding, I use the basal mainly for Read Alouds. Although many of my colleagues don't like the program, I think it actually has some quality literature in it. For example, we read "Wilma Unlimited", which is a great book about Wilma Rudolph and a short story about crows by Jean Craighead George. I am about to start a selection from Native American author Joseph Bruchak. Since many of my students could not read this level story, I read it aloud, sometimes from the actual book that I take out from the library. The enjoyed Craighead George's story about having crows for pets that they begged for me to read more- we ended up reading almost the whole collection of short stories! Of course, we supplement this program by using leveled texts. I don't know if your basal series is anything like this, but if it is, I'd say, look through and pick out the best stories to read as Read Alouds and to model strategies, then use leveled readers to become more fluent and to practice using the strategy they learned during the Read Aloud. ~Kecia _______________________________________________ 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.
