I’m still here: Writing Middle-School Reading Curriculum

 I know it may seem as though I’ve “gone away” but I’m still here. I have been busy updating my webpage (but my webmaster has gone on vacation), finishing the last couple of weeks in my stats class, and trying to keep up with the work my teachers create during weekly curricululm writing sessions. I’ve also presented for two Illinois state conferences: Illinois Reading Council and the Illinois Coalition for Educating At-Risk Youth (ICEAERY) over several days.  But all in all, life is just getting in the way of my blogging. And I’ve decided…I try to write too much. But I want my blogs to be worthy of your time, so I try to incorporate valuable information, visual images, and personal insights….wow! can that be draining….all grammatically correct! I am an English teacher!

Okay, so what are the insights here? Well, I’ve been working this spring in Southern Illinois with a sixth grade reading teacher who has not had her own materials. The literature series that the school uses is available, but no one seems to like it…perhaps because it’s dated and perhaps because the stories are canonical, have little relationship to the real lives of kids– dated also in the context of best practices. So, we started working on developing a 6th grade reading curriculum that was built around genre and comprehension strategy instruction using differentiated methodologies. Using the Backwards by Design approach, we built one unit…then we needed to find the texts and decide on differentiation methods.  My teacher saw that this process wasn’t going to be just a day or two and frustration began to set in.

Then Treasures fell into our laps. Now, I will tell you, I am not a great fan of textbooks–they suggest too much for a single lesson, both in content and skills and they offer too little. I avoided them like the plague when I taught, especially teacher editions. Treasures does that, too–suggests too much coverage of material, packs too many strategies into a single lesson, but on the other hand,  it comes through much of the time with some good supports for differentiating instruction. I wouldn’t buy the program in its entirety, another pitfall because some of what looks good needs this piece or that piece, but since it (like all textbooks) pushes too much in too little time, you can pick and choose. On the whole, if you, as a teacher want to differentiate reading instruction, have little time to plan a customize a curriculum for your school culture and intend to follow through by reading the work of differentiating gurus, like Carol Ann Tomlinson, Betty Hollas, Katherine McKnight, Rick Wormeli, then Treasure may be the series for you.