Does anyone use this? I am in 4th grade la. We already have a strong program for writing. We are previewing this and I think it would be helpful for me because it will give me an overall structure to my units. What are your thoughts if you have used it?
We have the TC Units for reading and writing. I find them ok. Not all the lessons are great and I find myself cutting out a lot of what's in the lessons. But overall I'd say it's not a terrible program. We also have a staff developer from TC that works with us and I go to workshops at TC so that helps a lot. The reading units are new this year so we are still getting a feel for them. But I will say they are much better than what they had before.
I do not have the read aloud books yet but I think my school will buy them before I start using it next year. We are also working on aligning it with social studies so that the american history reading unit goes along with the social studies unit. I am actually pretty excited about using this next year. It will give me some more structure to follow and I will not have to find read alouds that match with certain skills well.
I will tell you now you need to start The American Revolution in SS at least 2 weeks before the reading and writing units. It was hard for my kids to write or even plan about something they didn't know much about. It was a real struggle.