Mr. Popper's Penguins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Stories Julian Tells, and Ramona the Brave) as well as Rigby Readers for guided reading and Rebecca Sitton Spelling (which was too easy). My students really struggled with decoding and deriving meaning of the vocabulary words through the novels, plus we've all seen Willy Wonka in the movies, and even though we compared the book and the movie before taking the test, students were still confusing the two. Can you believe they're ALL now movies except Julian?! Needless to say, those novels are no longer used.
Project Read and Explode the Code (LOVED it!) plus a few other resources when I taught basic skills, and didn't teach reading for the past two years while I was in science lab.
Journeys uses the Focus Wall concept and Irene Fountas created the guided reading part. There are books for below, on, and above grade level as well as ELL and vocabulary. It has a good deal of vocabulary development and non-fiction reading. From what I can see, everything is created for you. Lesson plans are prewritten and student pages are easy to copy. I'm not sure how much I like the mostly worksheet approach, but I do see plans for a journal, listening center, and word work stations...not sure if the district purchased them though.... I'm also wondering if spelling words are embedded.
The website only shows the first grade teacher's guide, so I'm looking forward to getting a peek at the guides for upper grades.
Any experiences, advice, or resources?