my thoughts

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Home : 2004 : April : 8

my thoughts
By teach2

This has been our first year with Voyager. I love the content and the reading text because it does such a good job of bringing in factual science and social studies topics, puts a lot of words on the page so that students
get used to seeing a lot of text at one time (reducing fear factor), and ties fiction in with the factual information. The whole-class lessons seem pretty strong for the most part, but I think that because of the content of the text and its drawing-only illustrations it needs some visual aids that illustrate unfamiliar places, animals, plants, etc. Voyager allows you to add a little

of your own personality during the whole-class lessons, but you are not to ever leave anything that is scripted out of the lesson. The spelling words tie somewhat to the reading selections, but the activities are the usual word search, word scramble, fill in the blank, alphabetize. The stations time locks the teacher to one table with a small group and an extremely scripted lesson that we were told to never veer from in any way. It even includes script for how to correct answers. While you are at your table following your script (same for each group), one other group is to be working with partners and alone to read and do workbook pages and the other station group is playing a board game with vocabulary words or spelling patterns. I've not been able to make this time meet my standards of time-effecient learning because my students either waste time, play, or copy off of one another instead of doing the assignment or playing the game for its intended purpose. It bothers me a lot to have 2/3 of my class of non-self-directed students doing self-directed activities! The teacher station is the same for each group, and in 2nd grade consists of reading 4 or 5 spelling patterns and a series of words up until January. After that, it is mostly monitored reading with teacher asking comprehension questions after the reading. I feel really restricted by the program and its time requirements because it leaves almost no time for things like handwriting, science or social studies, art, etc. I've heard 3rd grade teachers with the same complaint as we 2nd that it includes very little grammar and composition. While it directs students to write a paragraph, it has never taught what a paragraph and its critical attributes are. In summary, the program is really pretty good, but it does have some gaps and does need some meat added to the basic skeleton...but leaves little space or time to add much of anything. I feel like it limits me to being a mediocre teacher, but I've taught a long time and have a lot of resources to draw on. Our administrators love it because they think that it helps make the weak teachers better, which I can see that it should. It's as good as anything else out there, just really expensive, very scripted, and fairly limiting to individual teacher creativity and skills.