CAFE anyone?

Our county runs a basal reading program, Houghton Mifflin to be exact. We have some freedom in how we use it and I chose basically to use the basal anthology stories as a shared reading component of my day. The stories are, for the most part, examples of high quality children's literature. You can't really go wrong when you are reading stories written by the likes of Tomie DePaola, Patricia Polacco and Dav Pilkey. I chose to use these stories as a way to teach reading strategies and skills. I found the CAFE board helped as a reference for these good reader strategies. I introduced each as suggested in the CAFE book and we posted them as a class. We referred to them OFTEN before independent reading and certainly during guided reading group time.