I have been using these in my classroom since Easter and I am a huge fan!
I have using the different levels in my class to differentiate for my groups, however each lesson also contains suggested activities for differentiation.
Each book contains 18 units of work, the units of work consist of a variety of genres of text. This is an ideal opportunity to pick and choose your units to link with your writing genre. Alternatively I use these books as an opportunity to revisit the writing genres and remind the class of the specific elements of each one.
Each unit also comes with a detailed lesson plan that outlines the activities for each unit.
I particularly like the vocab elements which can include syllabification, homophones, prefix and suffixes.
As the children are engaging with the text for comprehension activities, it is easy to link the phonics and grammar element to consolidate everything within one piece of text.
These are some examples of a text and written activities from the 3rd class book.
The table above shows the variety of text fiction and non-fiction that are included in the book, along with the genres. Each unit of work also comes with self-assessment for the children to complete, along with some suggested assessment strategies that can be used with the whole class.
Overall I really like these books to bring a structured approach to my literacy lessons. My focus for Term 2 was reading fluency, and I hope to develop that along with their vocabulary in Term 3. These books are ideal to consolidate fluency and vocab.
Another element of these books which I have yet to explore is the Digital Assessment for each book. I hope to use it with my class over the next few weeks.
If you would like more information on these books click here.
Any other questions on the above post, please send me a PM.
A.M.
Aistear Múinteoir 