Hi, I asked questions about Reading Mastery before school began and before I knew the restraints I would be dealing with in trying to help my children. I teach Resource for the first time in 27 Years of experience and most of my children come to me for 1 period a day (55 min). I am to teach reading, writing and math in this time period as well as reinforce classroom skills. I have spent 3 weeks strugling to put together a program that would successfully do all this, but I can not get it together. I attended a Workshop on SRA on Friday and was told SRA’s Corrective Reading or Fast Cycle would be a better fit under these circumstances. What do you think? I feel to pressure get up and going now as most students 2nd -5th are at least 2 years behind in reading. I bought Reading Reflex before school started and use it with my 1st grader and lowest 2nd grader, but the others think it’s silly. HELP!
Kathye
Been there, done that!!! Yes, in one hour you are to get them over whatever difficulties they’re having in regular classes and fix all their other problems, and of course they all have different problems. You end up doing a tiny bit of everything and not much sticks.And it’s not that you’re a bad teacher — you’re just not ten good teachers!!!
Here’s my take — in the “just my opinion” category.
I decided that the best thing for me to do was to prioritize — so I did Corrective Reading with them. A whole lot less insanity for me — still had to juggle because I had kids in different levels, so it wasn’t perfect, but in the “off” time they did independent work on the myriad other things (I’ve got a good times tables workbook for sale on my site ;)). And it’s at their level so they didn’t think it was silly once we got going; with the timed reading and things they could tell they were making progress so in a matter of weeks they really were eager to do it.
When they’re getting some reading skills under their belt, lots of other things start to turn around and face positive directions. Lots of them can then actually do work independently because they can read, so they can benefit from the kind of seatwork that was a real exercise in futility before.