Poorly Designed and Overly Complicated

My Take

The whole curriculum isn't worth anywhere near the price we have paid for it. Workbooks are utterly useless and a waste of money. They are a carbon copy of the textbooks and districts should save themselves the money by simply purchasing a classroom set of the hardbacks.

The only system is burdensome and poorly designed. You have to click through too many tabs to find what you want. For example, if you assigned a story and later decide you want to print off a quiz instead of having students complete it on their computers, you can't simply go back to the assignment to get the quiz. You have to go on a whole separate scavenger hunt to track it down, The only good thing about lessons is how you can easily scaffold them to help support readers of different ability levels.

Lesson videos are corney and nearly pointless. Students do not have a positive opinion of them. If you are teaching the lesson yourself instead of assigning them as independent work, Id skip them entirely.

We were sold on buying the curriculum in large part because at our school we had been developing our own and finding sources for modeling and practice through a wide range of available free and low-cost alternatives. We were shocked to find out after purchasing this system that not only did it hardly offer any practice for formative assessment (despite being told otherwise), but we were also mystified to find that the "self-graded quizzes" didn't actually grade any of the short response questions, despite being promised otherwise during the initial sales pitch. So at the end of the day, after teachers struggled to set up this albatross of a curriculum and fit it into lessons, it turns out to offer VERY little of any benefit outside of being an updated text book full of short stories.

If you want an updated text book of short stories, you might want to give Studysync a look. If you want an actual classroom curriculum, I'd look elsewhere.