Has anyone used this series? It is completely scripted and I'm not sure if it will leave room to do any literacy workstations or any Word Wall work. If you have used it, how have you incorporated Guided Reading, Workstations, and Word Work into your reading block? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
I did one year of this in first grade. It took about 35-50 for each lesson (including workbook time). We also moved students to the appropriate class so a 2nd grader could be with a first grade teacher if they were below level. Due to my schedule, I could only fit literacy workstations in two days a week. This was our reading program. It lasted the year and then we moved to balance literacy this past year.
I have used all the versions of SRA for more than 20 years. We have used the newest, Reading Mastery, for two years. If your reading block is longer than 45 minutes or so, you will have time to do additional work. Do you have the Language component or the Read Aloud component? If you also use those parts of Mastery, it will take much longer to complete the scripted lessons. We use Mastery as our below-grade level reading program and I always supplement with phonics, comprehension, and fluency activities. I use the Reading A-Z website for much of the extra curriculum. I also do literacy centers as seatwork.
At my school, the kindergarten and first grade classes only use Reading Mastery for pull-out intervention. The primary grade teachers did not think it was comprehensive enough to be a core reading program, so you would definitely need to incorporate non-phonics skills into your reading block in addition to RM. Our intervention kids work with the RM program for 45 minutes, but these are the kids who need more intensive reading help. I would guess that you might be able to work with RM with benchmark-level kids in a shorter period of time, but if the lesson is scripted, you're pretty much locked into the 45-minute time frame.
