Ginn readers

Ginn was a staple in basal reading materials for years: esp. the 60’s and 70’s. They went through several programs and revisions and I guess were eventually bought up by a larger company.

They were decent in their day, we had them in the 70’s, eclectic, of course.

uuh, aren’t you paying for this school, doesn’t that make you a customer??

why do parents feel so intimidated at expensive private schools to question what is being done,

go in and observe, ask for the books and workbooks so you can look at them

see what you think

from all of your posts i cannot imagine anyone more knowledgeable as to what will make for a good reading program and what will not

libby

I collect and use a lot of old readers. Some of the stories in them are very good; I don’t know the recent Ginn series, but usually they have a variety including at least some of value. Many of us remember with pleasure the stories and poems we were exposed to through literary readers in elementary and middle school.

It all depends on how you use them. If you use the reader as an interesting collection of short stories and learning activities in literature, this can be an excellent method of teaching. If you use it as another way to assign busywork to get through the hour, then of course they’re bad.

I have some large and ugly questions about the teaching out of chapter books that is done now. Everybody is so snowed by the difficulty of the reading — wow, he’s reading chapter books in class, and he’s only in Grade 2!! — that they don’t look too closely at the depth of the work that is being done out of said books.
Just for one bad example: My daughter in Grade 6 was working out of “Island of the Blue Dolphins”. She could read and write because I’d taught her, thank God because this school didn’t have a clue how. Out of two Grade 6 classes in the school, she was in the upper level one, supposedly using a Grade 7 reader as well as novels. I went on for the parents’ night. On the wall was a sloppy cut-out whale, and glued around it were some messy file cards attached to various parts of the whale with bits of wool. Some of these file cards had a couple of sentences written passably; most of the others had primary level printing, spelling errors, incomplete sentences, etc. It turns out that this was supposed to be a “story web” and this was the *final project* for this class after reading the novel. Umm, Grade 6, upper-level, final project — Shouldn’t they be able to do more than a couple of mis-spelled sentence fragments?? Is the size of a file card a reasonable length limit for a kid of this age and stage?? (My daughter, dysgraphia and all, was writing short articles for fun and submitting them to youth magazines. Got rejected, but she could write/hunt-and-peck a two-page essay!)

One of the *advantages* of a textbook is that it helps to prevent this complete sloughing off of responsibility. Nobody can completely avoid incompetence of course, but if you follow a text series it’s at least clear what the usual expectations are.
And the text, if at least halfway competent, includes a wide variety of activities. Some teachers always have kids write stories, others always ask the same simple factual questions, others always have them fill in worksheets and/or computer worksheet-on-a-screen. A fairly competent text will have many things: exercises on using vocabulary (strongly recommended by NIH study), questions to be answered in sentence form, paragraph/short essay questions, questions involving deeper analysis, and suggestions for creative writing. A teacher who uses the text well will use these to help students study the story in depth and experiment with various writing modes of their own.
The fact that the text has only short stories and poems is actually an advantage, since it allows really thorough analysis of pieces of writing; a novel in grade school is too much to do anything but read through quickly.
A really good English program will use the text for in-depth literature study and also read together (with class discussion) one or two novels.

Again, this all depends on *how* it’s being done — if your private school is actually academically good, you may be very happy with it.

libby wrote:
>
> uuh, aren’t you paying for this school, doesn’t that make
> you a customer??
>
> why do parents feel so intimidated at expensive private
> schools to question what is being done,
>
> go in and observe, ask for the books and workbooks so you can
> look at them
>
> see what you think
>
> from all of your posts i cannot imagine anyone more
> knowledgeable as to what will make for a good reading program
> and what will not
>
> libby

Thanks Libby. I suppose I should ask to take a look at the materials. This was a real rush situation to get the child out of a bad social situation. They had a slot. I called a neighbor and asked if her kids liked the teacher in this school, since my number one priority was to find someone kind (not that the previous teacher wasn’t- it was a few of the students who were causing the problem) - and off we went. Only 2 more months of school so we can always go back to public school in September. I suppose I don’t want to come off as someone who walks in and wants to take over and tell them how to educate my child. You are right though, I should make an appointment and take a look at things before making a decision about next year. Since I am now a paying customer the situation is different from previous years.
Its funny, my son is convinced they don’t have “reading” in this school. I was assured they do 2 hours a day of language arts. In public school they were expected to do 45 min a day of sustained silent reading + “reading group” which mostly seemed to consist of silent reading while the teacher questioned each child orally one on one about the books and listened to them read 2 times a quarter + read when finished with seatwork. Here, none of the above happens. I have to say I was surprised when my reluctant reader son expressed dissapointment that the children in this school don’t take out a book and read when they finish with assigned activities. I’m going to ask if it’s OK for him to do so. The principal says they get very good scores on standardized tests. He had to take an entrance exam which he said was difficult. We shall see.
At least now after only 2 days in the class,he says he has made friends, no bullies in sight, and he seemed very much a different child when he came home.