For the 2021 – 2022 school year, we chose Rod and Staff 5 for our reading curriculum. I am actually a bigger fan of CLE Reading, but I didn’t want my son to do CLE Reading 6 in his 4th grade year, so this was how we repeated grade 5 reading with fresh material. Currently, Rod and Staff Reading 5 is going for only $32.70 on the Milestone Books website.
Overall, we have been very pleased with this curriculum. There are a few drawbacks, which I will discuss below, but for $32.70 the curriculum is more than worth it!
First of all, when I received the curriculum, I saw that the student workbook was very thin in comparison to all of the “Light Units” we were used to receiving with our CLE programs. I also noticed that there were only 60 passages in the anthology. I was concerned that this was not enough material to get us through the school year.
Was I wrong! Many of the stories are filled with emotional complexity and thoughtful moral lessons. The worksheets are intense and challenging as well! Unless it is a poetry day, there is little chance of my son and I completing everything necessary for a story in one day
Usually, I have my son read the story and do the worksheets, and then the next day we review and discuss. This means we complete two passages a week. Even though I prefer CLE as a more comprehensive program as it covers so many areas, I have never had better discussions with my son regarding our values, what we believe, etc. than I have with Rod and Staff Reading 5. The discussion questions in the teacher’s guide and the student workbook are just really outstanding. I can’t say enough good things about it!
The only real downside to the curriculum is that the workbook is a bit weak on the “literary elements.” Partly, I think because this curriculum is meant to be taught in a classroom, they expect the teacher to expand on the topics mentioned (but they don’t give this information in the teacher’s guide). So they might mention the idea of a “theme” and ask a question about it on one lesson, and then it might show up on a test. For this reason, I had been giving my son open book tests since, with everything going on with homeschooling and having two kids, I really need this in the teacher’s guide as a script in order to teach it. Some of the test questions also expect the child to have memorized plots, actions, and motivations that occurred in the stories of the previous month. This is why I do the tests open book (until I lost the test booklet). I want to know that my son understands the information and can apply it, but I don’t expect him to have these stories memorized. As far as Mennonite specific content, there may have been one or two selections that we skipped, but it had little effect on us using the program overall. There are also a few essay assignments throughout the curriculum. A few we have skipped and a few we have done, but the main part of the program are the passages and the worksheets. (Some of the essay topics were a little too challenging for us at this time.)
While I’m excited to return again to CLE Reading next year, doing CLE Reading 6 for his 5th grade year, we will hands down, definitely do CLE Reading 6 for this 6th grade year. (Update late 2022: my son begged to do CLE again and move on to level 7, but that's okay with me.)
Since CLE Reading 6 only has 5 Light Units, we may also do a few literature guides as well. If you haven’t noticed, I prefer the anthology approach for the elementary years. My son is an avid reader, so our reading curriculum time is to work on verbal skills, social-emotional skills, vocabulary and whole lot of other things that I feel are better dealt with through an anthology curriculum. The anthologies are also giving him more “social experiences” to draw from.
I hope this review helps someone in choosing reading curriculum for the upcoming year. Please don’t hesitate to email me with a specific question about this curriculum, since I know it is hard to find information on Rod and Staff Reading in the upper elementary grades!
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