Balanced Literacy and The Basal Reading Program

I believe that in order to have a balanced literacy program, you need to include the basal reading program. Though, I do not believe that it is useful to make your entire literacy program based on basal reading. As a teacher, you need to tailor your instruction to your students’ needs and the basal reading program mainly only focusing on one type of student learner at a specific level. I believe that the basal reading programs are good to an extent in that they have lesson plans already made that you can easily incorporate into your everyday instruction. Though, I think I would select different parts of the lessons and add/tailor them to fit in my instruction and the individual needs of my students. There are many good lessons in the books, such as comprehension, phonemic, writing, and many uses for students to build upon their skills which are great to have for balanced literacy instruction.

I have not seen a basal reading book in my classroom this year. They do have a spelling test book that the CT uses every week, but I do not believe that this is apart of the basal reading program. Despite the fact that I have not seen a basal program taking place in the classroom, my CT does use guided reading almost everyday with the students. She has about 5-6 groups of 3-5 students who are at the same level. These students are working on the same 4 books for about a week or two and they the different steps to guided reading: pre-reading, reading, responding, exploring, and applying.