Book Club Plus vs. Reading Mastery

My CT uses one particular literacy instruction within my Kindergarten classroom along with her own ideas. Reading Mastery is the main literacy instruction that my teacher works with through out the school year. This program starts by teaching phonemic awareness and sound-letter correspondence. From there, word recognition and short readings come in to play. With word recognition, comes vocabulary development, comprehension and reading aloud. “Later lessons emphasize accurate and fluent decoding while teaching students the skills necessary to comprehend and learn from expository text. Lessons are designed to be fast-paced and interactive. Students are grouped by similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes placement assessments and a continuous monitoring component.”

This is similar to Book Club Plus (BCP) in regards to what happens within literacy centers. Both instructions have centers that focus on reading, working with words, phonics, vocabulary, and process writing. In both models, there are guided reading groups, writer’s workshop and teacher read aloud. Since my students are in Kindergarten, there are a lot of teacher read aloud’s. Within guided reading groups in Reading Mastery and BCP, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, letter-recognition, etc. is taught. Another similarity involves assessments. Both instructional models have some form of assessment to assure that students are learning what they are being taught. The main difference being that BCP involves assessments of reading, writing, culture, discussion, and evaluation. Reading Mastery only focuses on the reading aspect of literacy.

BCP is also difference in the sense that it has shared reading, independent reading and book clubs. Due to the fact that my students don’t know how to read, there is no shared reading involved within my classroom. That being said, students don’t get to hear their peers reading. Independent reading takes place on rare occasion in my classroom. These readings seem to be pointless because my students don’t know how to read and see this as a time of social hour. They are looking at the pictures but aren’t engaging in meaningful learning. Within BCP, there are a lot of opportunities for shared reading, and community sharing. Within Reading Mastery, this does not take place. Book clubs also do not take place within Reading Mastery. Students are secluded to their guided reading groups only and haven’t gotten to the point where they can have a successful book club.

Reading is seen in my classroom when students have to do calendar, read the word name, signs around the classroom and certain words that my teacher has the students reading. Writing takes place when my students have to write their names, write letters and numbers. With the new Radner Model curriculum that has been implemented in my school, students are to do all the writing with no dictation. Students have been writing letters to try and represent what they are saying, but they have no foundation yet.  Listening is always seen in my class. Students have to listen to stories being read, directions, and they have to listen to their peers. Speaking is seen when my teacher calls on students when their hands are raised and in certain other situations. When they are at their tables, they aren’t to talk, but talking can be seen since they have a hard time listening to that expectation.