New Teacher: Alternatives to Lucy Calkins in structuring Reading/Writing curriculum?
I'm a brand-new 4th Grade teacher, basically fresh out of grad school. Some help that was.
They've given me the Lucy Calkins "Units of Study for teaching Writing Grades 3-5" box. I'm launching the Writing Workshop now. It's alright, better than nothing. At least it gives me a good idea of what to do every day for the time being, until I've got some experience under my belt and I feel like I can get a little more creative.
There's no school-wide structure for Reading, however. I'm in kind of a sink-or-swim situation right now. Another teacher down the hall (a saint) has let me borrow their "Guiding Readers and Writers" book by Fountas & Pinnell, and it has a wonderful little chapter called "Getting Started: The First Twenty Days of Independent Reading," which is just that! Wouldn't it be nice if they had this for every day of the year? I'm on Day 2, and wondering what the hell I'm going to do in 18 days.
There's tons of 900 page books on Amazon that I can buy, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like they're all basically just very big-picture. I, for one, love Mosaic of Thought, but it's not really helping me structure reading units at the moment. Like, I agree that reading is very exciting! Now what do I do!
That's basically it. I need some good resources on structuring Reading units and breaking them down to the day-to-day in reading. Any advice is very much appreciated!
Posted Sep 16, 2015, 6:52 AM UTC