April 3rd Post - Basal and Vocabulary

I have to admit that I had always had bad ideas and feelings about the Basal reading programs. After reading Tompkins chapter 10 about them and discussing them in class I have a little more positive outlook on them. As Natasha and I looked at our first grade program book we were amazed at the amount of detail that was in them and all the ideas they give you to do a whole week of lessons on. After seeing this we realized that you wouldn't have to be an actual teacher to follow and teach the basal programs. They spell out everything for you, it's almost like, as a teacher, you wouldn't even have to think or put in any of your own creativity. In Tompkins it says, “commercial publishers tout basal reading programs as complete literacy programs, but most teachers adapt them to meet their students' needs and use them in conjunction with other instructional approaches” (Tompkins 344). This eased my nerves to know that a lot of teachers don't just rely on the basals, they use other resources and tailor them to the students in their classroom. I think that the basal is a wonderful tool and resource to have in your classroom, but I would never encourage anyone to just do the basal and follow it religiously.

We don't use the basal reading program in my CT's classroom, but she does do a lot of work on vocabulary. One of the activities that she does, which I really enjoy, is word scrambles. When they learn a new word, usually one that has to do with a theme (they learned president on president's day) they get each individual letter in that word and try to make new words out of it. For example, when they were learning about animals and their characteristics they learned the word habitat. They were given each individual letter in habitat and then had to think of as many words that they could make from it. Like: at, hat, bat, it, bit, hit, etc. The students really get into it and then as a large group my CT calls on the students and writes on the board all the words that they came up with.