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Week 4
What a Tree Has Seen
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Introduction
What Is the Spotlight Guided Reading
Manual?
This
Santillana Spotlight on English
Guided Reading Manual
is designed to help students of all backgrounds and levels
develop essential reading skills, such as decoding and
comprehension, as well as to practice and reinforce listening,
speaking, writing, and viewing skills. Utilizing the Spotlight
Thematic Library leveled readers, teachers are able to choose
from a variety of levels and themes to accommodate the
literacy needs of all their students.
Santillana Spotlight on English
is a program that follows
a Balanced Literacy approach to language acquisition,
focusing on all the reading and writing models, such as
aloud, shared, guided, and independent. In addition, both
the comprehensive program and this manual contain
strategies to teach phonics and grammar, both integral
elements of a Balanced Literacy program.
Guided reading is a key component of
Santillana
Spotlight on English
reading instruction. Even though the
leveled stories contained in the Spotlight on Reading sections
of the main textbook are also used for group and guided reading, the leveled readers
included in the Spotlight Thematic Library serve as excellent tools to teach basic reading
skills to groups of developing readers and more advanced skills with increasingly
challenging texts to groups of more fluent readers. This manual deals specifically with
the Thematic Library leveled readers. For information on leveling criteria please consult
the Spotlight Readability charts available on our web site, spotlightonenglish.com.
How Does It Work?
The manual is organized into eight levels, with each level covering eight weeks.
Each week, which is divided into five days of work, covers one reader. The first day is
usually dedicated to presenting the reader, the theme, frontloading vocabulary, and
making predictions. The second day focuses on the receptive skills of listening and reading
while engaging in echo reading and then guided reading. Usually two or three reading
comprehension skills, such as main idea or cause/effect relationships, are introduced,
reviewed, or maintained on this day. On the third day, students engage in phonics practice
as well as in activities that develop vocabulary strategies, while on the fourth day they carry
out activities involving grammar. On the fifth day, the focus is on the productive skills of
speaking and writing. The culminating activity of the fifth day always involves a writing
prompt and the writing process.