TOS Review: Scott Foresman-Pearson Reading Street

I love Reading Street!

Yeah, it's that simple! I was impressed as soon as I pulled these fun-looking Grade 5 books out of the cardboard box. It didn't take much flipping through the pages to know that this was a GREAT program!

Rule #1 on Reading Street: Reading Confidence and boost confidence! The common core emphasizes reading and writing independently. Engaging students is the first step to independence. - Pearson

So, where should I start? 

Well,  Reading Street comes with 2 student text books filled with literary excerpts from longer books. (Many of these books would be easy finds at local libraries so your students could read them for additional reading opportunities.) There's lessons on word types such as homographs, antonyms and Latin word roots. There's different kinds of writing with models and prompts as well as AWESOME "Writer's Checklist" boxes to work on certain skills. There's vocabulary building, reading comprehension questions, spelling words, and connections to Science and Social Studies. The student texts are visually bright and appealing with "Let's Think About" connection boxes on the side for additional activities and  questions to explore. And you COULD skip the worksheets (from the CD-ROMS) and notebook from the texts if you prefer! Flexibiliy!

For us teachers, there's the "Guide on the Side: A Customized Literacy Approach for the Fifth Grade Reading Teacher" filled with information on oral language, fluency, vocabulary/word analysis, comprehension, writing, genre/text structure, and several other resources. There's SO much information that it's a little overwhelming! Time to break out the Post-it notes to mark those important areas for OUR unique learners!

And there's 2 accompanying CD-ROMs: Teachers Resource and ExamView. The teachers resource disc  is FULL of printables to go along with the student texts. Each section is broken down by lesson and easy-peasy to find! There's even vocabulary flash cards all done! You just have to print and cut! And the ExamView disc has the baseline group test, fresh reads for fluency and reading comprension, weekly tests, and unit and end-of-year benchmark tests. And get this...It scores the tests for us! Yep! Whoop!

My Thoughts
I think you already know! LOL I really liked the ease of use. It seemed a little overwhelming at first - that Guide on the Side is QUITE extensive! - but it gets easier as you start using it. The lessons were already broken up into weekly and unit chunks for me. (Each unit has 6 weeks of lessons.) I LOVE that it's everything-in-one curriculum so I don't have to purchase different aspects of Language Arts separately. The lessons kept Sugar Maple interested and were a great combination of reading and writing for her. But I wish I didn't have to print out ALL THOSE WORKSHEETS. It's handy to have the CD to print them as needed, but sometimes I would rather have them done for me to save time and computer ink. (Oh, computer ink! I'm always out! LOL) No curriculum is PERFECT, but this gets pretty close for us.

Now, Reading Street is a more traditional curriculum so if that's not YOUR APPROACH then this probably isn't for you. However, it's such a complete curriculum that's easy to implement and flexible to add in "living books" and notebooking (for Charlotte Mason) that it might be worth a look! And if you ARE using more traditional textbooks, here you go! LOL

Wanna read what others thought of Reading Street? Head over to the TOS Review Crew here!

Disclaimer: As a member of The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew, Our Side of the Mountain was provided this product free in exchange for our honest review. All thoughts and opinions are our own.