basal & blocks

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Home : 2004 : July : 19

basal & blocks
By Lynn H.

I love the 4 Blocks system. Incorporating the basal is hard to explain. Read the Guided Reading section of the 4 Blocks book and this will make more sense. I look at the upcoming story for the week and use one of the Guided
Reading strategies to teach it. If we play the Prove It! game (prediction), I pre-select the pages we'll read each day and get my chart paper ready with the Prove It! heading. We gather on the rug and picture walk the pre-selected pages (I never read the story in a day) after talking about the pictures and going over vocab words and possibly difficult words, they predict what will happen

and I record their prediction on the chart paper. I then let them choose partners to read with (I pull sticks and let the child choose, but always have veto power. I try to let my struggling readers choose first, since they often choose helpful, strong-reading partners.) I set the timer for 8-10 minutes depending on the pages and walk around listening and helping students (giving extra time to my strugglers) as they sit around the room reading. If they finish, they go back and read it again until the buzzer goes off. Then we gather on the rug and go over the predictions and see if they could "prove" their prediction right or wrong. I also use this time to ask additional comprehension questions.
I also try to tailor my Word Work to the phonics concept for the week. This model can be very time consuming to prep for up front, but by the end of the year I spent less time since I knew what I was doing! Please e-mail with any further questions (Post another note if you don't hear from me in a few days, my e-mail has been screwy lately!)