If you participate in the Basal Alignment Project Edmodo group, you may have seen the following post by Meredith Liben of Student Achievement Partners. If you did not, it is worth reading the announcement below.

The Read-aloud Alignment Project (RAP) is launching in December.

We know many of you have been asking about K-2 BAP revisions and we have heard you! But we are not planning to do basal alignment work for K-2. Here is why: BAP and AAP were designed to be a temporary solution to the problem of not having CCSS aligned materials. They also have the wonderful side effect of training lots of teachers in text dependent questions and good tasks. They have also been a marvelous example of putting the ‘common’ good into the Common Core.

But in K-2, there are now good reading programs published as of this summer. That means you don’t have to make your own. One such program is freely available for the download and printing. It is on Engage NY and is called the Core Knowledge Language Arts program NY edition. By mid-August it will have a full set of materials for pre-K through second grade in a Skills Strand (foundational reading) and a Listening and Learning Strand (ELA and literacy).
Go look for yourself. http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/r…
We ARE doing a CCSS project just for you! We are launching the Read-aloud Alignment Project (RAP) in December just for K-2 teachers. We will keep you posted here as details get planned.

Essentially, we will invite teachers to propose titles of books (chapter and picture) that represent works well worth reading. We’ll gather together to make questions worth answering and activities worth doing with those who can come to the two day training the Council of the Great City Schools and Student Achievement Partners will hold in Las Vegas this December. It will be similar hands-on training to that provided with BAP and AAP.

That’s not all! The training will also include how to locate, select and evaluate good informational articles and books to group as sets to connect to the read aloud anchor. They will build knowledge systematically on a topic. The sets will be a chance for your students to get a volume of reading practice on one topic, or can be a study unit you all do together.

Once trained, teams will return home and continue to develop excellent questions and standards-aligned activities for other great read-aloud books. We will host the RAP resources as they are written and reviewed just as we have with all the AAP and BAP revisions. Stay tuned for more details!

You can learn more about the BAP and retrieve the access code here.