I think the key is that you have concerns about your child's progress or the type of instruction, contact the teacher. There could be a lot more going on than you are hearing from your 5 year old. I wouldn't use the act of sending home books as a criteria for judging the K reading curriculum.

DD is in K at Rosemary Hills and takes part in a six child reading, writing and comprehension group every day for 30 minutes. She was already reading, but the group has taught her some additional skills and is focused on advancing reading, comprehension and writing at the same time. We also reinforce this at home, but I am very pleased with her instruction at school.

Anonymous wrote:I used to teach in mcps. We didnt send home leveled books, because if it wasn't returned, it was very hard and expensive to replace it. It's Anniying I know. But if u want to read leveled books at home try readinga-z.com they are fabulous and caN print leveled books to ur hearts content!

Thank you so much. I'm a NP, but the website you provided is awesome! I haven't tried yet, but do you know if I can get a member log in when I'm not a teacher?

I used to teach in mcps. We didnt send home leveled books, because if it wasn't returned, it was very hard and expensive to replace it. It's Anniying I know. But if u want to read leveled books at home try readinga-z.com they are fabulous and caN print leveled books to ur hearts content!

PP, sounds like your teacher really has a good system going. My son was in K last year and brought home maybe 5 books all year. He was supposed to be working on his writing since he came in at level 16+ but apparently that didn't happen enough either. If you child is a good reader make sure you are working on the writing at home as well.

My son goes to Oakland Terrace. The teacher breaks the kids up into four to five reading groups (the number of groups sometimes changes as she focuses on different skills). She created four stations with activities in each station. At some point, each group arrives at her station and she concentrates on either letter sounds, reading, or for the advanced group, writing. This is a daily routine with about 19 kids in the class and one parent volunteer per week to work with the kids at another station. As kids advance or need more work, she will move them into different groups or divide groups that get too large.

She doesn't send leveled books home and instead assigns 15 minutes of reading a night for the kids. My son is an advanced reader (not chapter books yet though) so we work on reading with him at home and I have noticed that his writing has improved with the focused teacher time.

Clearly, every school in MoCo handles this differently and it may even be different from teacher to teacher within a school. Just reading these posts there have been a wide variation in experiences... some much better than others.