Week 7 Reflection

My PDS school recently adopted a reading series to incorporate into the classroom, and this is something else that I as a preservice teacher have had to get familiar with. Week Seven of my internship was the first week in which I was to teach from the reading series. Our daily routine is fairly similar for the activities. We begin by looking at a large chart with pictures for new vocabulary words for the week. Then we sing a song that contains all of these vocabulary words. After that, we look at the big book for the week as a whole group. Finally, we practice comprehension strategies such as retelling, answering sequence questions, defining characters and settings.

All in all, I'm undecided in regards to how I feel about the reading series. The teacher's manual suggests more that we could be doing for the full series, however it would require us to replace our own circle time and doing so would mean the students would miss out on addressing a number of the state CSOs for the grade level. We've done our best to incorporate aspects into the day, adding the language arts materials onto the end of circle, but even then we find ourselves running behind because the material covered in the trade books is quite large. I think the series focuses on a number of very good skills that students need to begin developing, so in that regard I enjoy it. However, some of the vocabulary words being introduced seem to be on more of a first grade level, and I feel that there's a conflict between the letters we introduce in the reading series time and the letters we introduce during circle since they largely do not match up.