Beyond Basics: 6 Powerful Ways to Elevate Your Primary Reading Curriculum
Hey there, fellow teachers! Many of us have a reading curriculum program such as Journeys or Reading Street and it can be easy just to stick to what they provide. But sometimes they just don’t meet all your needs. Maybe there aren’t enough writing opportunities, not enough grammar practice or a lack of differentiated comprehension options.
When you’re teaching reading, you want your students to eventually build strong comprehension skills for both fiction and non-fiction! Plus, a solid vocabulary and good spelling go a long way in helping our little learners become better readers and writers overall.
Let me tell you that for the last fifteen or so years, my school used the anthology reading program called Journeys. It worked for some students but didn’t meet everyone’s needs so I put a lot of effort into differentiating and supplementing the spelling, vocabulary, grammar, comprehension and writing activities.
Therefore, I have some experience with supplementing and elevating an anthology curriculum. Check out some of my practical but effective strategies to really boost your students’ reading skills by supplementing your anthology reading curriculum or program!
Hands on projects
Hands on projects are a great way to have students channel their comprehension of a text into something fun. For example, if you read the non-fiction text in Journeys called “Animals Building Homes,” (about animals like bees and beavers that build their own habitats) students could select which animal they like and create a 3-D diorama of the animal habitat. It’s a fun way to supplement your reading curriculum program!
Bonus Writing Practice
My school’s reading curriculum also didn’t have a solid writing program so I was always looking for additional practice for my students. For each story from our reading program, I came up with one or two writing prompts. I would vary the types of writing addressed. For example, for the story “Dex: the Heart of a Hero”, I had students respond to the prompt: “If you were a super hero, how would you help others?” and for the story “Teacher’s Pets”, students wrote a persuasive letter to their families, trying to convince them to let them adopt a pet of their choice.
Fun Ways to Practice Spelling
Many children need more practice than what a basic reading anthology reading curriculum provides. Some ways I gave my students bonus practice were: writing words on black paper with gel pens, spelling on LCD tablets (a BIG hit the past two years), jumping rope and with each swing and saying a letter of the word and then the word (such as back “b-a-c-k-back”), writing spelling words with their fingers in weighted or kinetic sand (I prefer that more than regular sand or salt).
Additional Grammar and Mechanics Practice
I never found enough grammar activities or practice with capitalization and punctuation in my anthology reading curriculum. Therefore, I made a lot of my own activities and worksheets! You can find them in my resources down below but there are a lot on the web. Just Google what you need such as “capital letters place names” or search it in Teachers Pay Teachers and you should find plenty of options.
Keep reading for even more tips!
Visuals to Build Background Knowledge
If you have students who need to build background knowledge, whether they are ELL or not, you may need to provide support beyond what your reading curriculum provides. For example, in my small reading groups, I would perhaps have ELL students build more background knowledge about a topic by bringing in objects mentioned in the text (or showing photos of them). Thank goodness for our phones and iPads because they make it easy. When one of my ELL stdundts in second garde didn’t know what an orangutan was, I pulled up a photo in Google images.
Techonology makes elevating reading curriculum even easier!
Already Created Supplemental Resources for 30 Stories
Wouldn’t it be easier if somewhere you could find an already made, ready to go supplement for your school’s reading curriculum? Well, I decided to create on! I made a comprehensive (like seriously, usually around 100 pages) resource of grammar, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary activities for each (30) text in the second grade Journeys program to help me solve a lot of my challenges and meet my students’ needs.
There is a bundle of all the resources but can you also get activities for individual texts if your reading curriculum includes some of the same stories. Here are the texts included (click on any title to go to that specific resource on TPT):
- Ah, Music
- Animals Building Homes
- Click, Clack, Moo
- Dex: the Heart of a Hero
- Diary of a Spider
- Dogs
- From Seed to Plant
- Gloria, Who Might be my Best Friend
- Half Chicken
- Helen Keller
- Henry and Mudge
- How Chipmunk Got His Stripes
- Jellies
- Luke Goes to Bat
- Mr. Tanen’s Tie Trouble
- My Family/ Mi Familia
- My Name is Gabriela
- Now and Ben
- Officer Buckle and Gloria
- Penguin Chick
- Schools Around the World
- Super Storms
- Teacher’ Pets
- The Dog Who Dug for Dinosaurs
- The Goat in the Rug
- The Mysterious Tadpole
- The Signmaker’s Assistant
- The Ugly Vegetables
- Two of Everything
- Yeh Shen – a Chinese Cinderella Story
So I will share some images from these resources which are over on Teachers Pay Teachers, but you can also see how things like spelling words, comprehension responses, etc. are differentiated in this sneak peek video of the Henry and Mudge resource (week 1) .
Let’s check out two different ways you can share the Read and Response Questions (comprehension) with students. The option on the top is a standard printable (or you can use TPT’s Digital tool to use the PDF digitally). The second option is great for interactive notebooks if you want to mix things up, or you want to sneak in some fine motor practice with cut and glue.
For other comprehension activities, I added in some differentiation by presenting similar activities in different formats, such as these story summary pages. Also, some activities have lines, and some do not so you could choose which is one appropriate for certain students. A flip book for interactive notebooks is also included, as as well as alternative wording for story summaries such as first, next and last.
Check out the variations of the story summary activity below, included an option for interactive notebooks!
With spelling, there are color and black and white cards (for your printing needs), with the basic Journeys spelling list. It also includes blank cards so you can add other differentiated word lists.
There are also grammar practice page (no prep needed) and some are presented at different levels of difficulty too! Here on the left, students simply identify the subject and predicate but on the right students write their own sentences and identify the sentence parts.
Will this solve a lot of your challenges? Yes – it will solve the problems of not enough time, not being able to do the work to make your own resources for your students and more! It made my life much easier once I started using them with my second graders. And the other 29 resources are very similar with quantity and types of resources. BUT they also are bundled! If you look at the unit bundles like this one:
And the full year bundle is at a huge discount! You save MORE than 50% by getting it as opposed to buying resources for every story separately! And what teacher doesn’t love to save?
If you have more ideas on how to elevate your reading curriculum / program let us know.
Five Star Reviews:
Check out some teacher feedback – I know I always read feedback when I am looking for something, so let me share it so you don’t have to go on a hunt!
“This has been a valuable resource. It has helped keep the students engaged in learning during our Reading time.”
“Worked well as a supplement to our Journeys curriculum. Thank you!”
Other blog posts you may want to check out:
- 5 Minute Magic: Building Phonemic Awareness with Routines
- Unlock Reading: Fun Ways to Master CVC Words
- Mastering Phonics in Grades K-2 with Task Cards
- Super Sleuths: Uncovering “Why” with Cause and Effect
- 10 Fun Ways to Practice the Alphabet Now!
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Good luck with your week. You got this!!
