Basal Readers and Anthologies in the Cassroom

Basals/anthologies are good for the new teacher who doesn't know where to start and/or needs lesson plans that he or she can modify and fine tune. Basals/anthologies are intended to be engaging and keep students interested. Since they contain lots of themes, teachers can use them to plan thematic units. One of the things that I like the most about these types of books is that they contain extension activities, activities for students who finish early, and activities for special needs students. Sometimes they even contain inter-curricular activities which is something that I also like. I've even seen some readers that have multi-cultural lessons which is something that teachers need to use. Basals are also good for including vocabulary skills since it is predictable text.

The thing i dislike the most is that they are scripted programs. This doesn't leave for much wiggle room in the lesson plan and it doesn't give students much of a say or input in how or what they learn. They are also paced which means that the lessons could go by too quickly or too slowly for the lessons instead of letting the teacher pick the pace based on student need. Another thing I dislike the most about basals is that there is no explanation or purpose for doing things the way they do. This means that a teacher may not know why he or she is teaching what he or she is teaching or using the methods and steps that he or she is using. This can be unpleasant and awkward when a parent wants to talk about what's going on in a classroom. This type of approach is also generic and tends to use cookie cutter recipes that don't tailor to the variety of student interests. A lot of readers have lots of big colorful pictures which can be very distracting to young students and will take away from the meaning or value of the lesson. It's also bad that the approach focuses only on whole words since students won't be able to learn how to read or write whole words if they don't know how to put the parts of words together. This means that students won't be working on things like word recognition,sound symbol associations, or sound blending. Being mainly predictable text, it can become boring and dull to students and will become too mechanical instead of thought out.

Obviously, I am not a big fan of basal readers or NCLB. It's one thing to use basals for a little help and to get some ideas, but in many classrooms they are overused because of NCLB. I will rely more on finding lesson plans online that I can modify and adapt than I will on basal readers. I have already found many great lesson plans that I want to use in my classroom, and lots of them are even integrated.