Renovating Basal Readers

When I was a child in first grade, teachers used things called Basal Readers to teach reading to children. These were thick textbooks with collections of popular children's books all assembled inside. We would turn to the same page and the teacher would have students volunteer to read each page outloud, and then he/she would guide us through the questions at the end of the story and that was what we did for Reading time.

In my classroom today I teach reading by sharing a story aloud as well as teaching a specific word family or phonemic idea. I have easy books, medium level books and hard books, and I differentiate by putting my students into a book that suites their specific needs. It has been said that this is a much more effective way of teaching reading than using the "old" basal readers.

What should I do with all of those old basal readers in my cabinet? By the way, they still have wonderful stories assembled inside of them, and these stories are still relevant, but I can't teach each student the old dis-engaged way of how I learned to read because this generation needs more hands-on experience in books.

I got the following idea from a good friend and previous classroom teacher. I cut off the covers on some old basal readers and used the binder combs to assemble each story into a book. I have dozens of books ready for my students to read. 

 

One of the students that read one of these books actually thought I had written it because of the binder combs. These books are just as great as the books in our library, but they are also easier to send home because if they get ruined, I don't even have to worry about them. I have so many, and I didn't spend lots of money buying nice hard copy books to send home.

I love that some of them include skill pages to give the child something to do with their mom and dad when they are reading it at home.

The other thing that I do with "old" basal readers is that I send them home with my good readers that need more practice with fluency because they can keep them for a few weeks and practice reading and re-reading the stories to ramp up their fluency and reading voice.