A GLAD 4th grade 9 (J)

I subbed two days in a row in a fourth grade class that is probably 1/2 bilingual. She runs her classroom with heavy GLAD influence.

Observations from her class:
1. Fuzzies. She uses fuzzy balls to reward students for good work. I LOVE this. They are fun and fun to say.
2. She has baggies pinned to the inside of each cubby for students to hold fuzzies and raffle tickets that they can then use to buy different things in the classroom, either privileges or objects.
3. Her reading time is set up basically as a rotation. They have the choice to read to self, read to someone, word work, listen to reading or free write. They have to do a variety of options throughout the week.
4. She has taped reminders to each of their desks, the names with the multiplication chart, ruler, etc., talk moves, and their group number (GLAD component).
5. She has a list of week assignments for students to be working on at all times. This includes items like scholastic news, etc. for automatic filler.
6. She has a cork board with pushpinned sticky notes alerting students to what hw is missing. I love this because I do it anyways!

GLAD

I have spent time at one school lately where the GLAD program is used consistently. There are some portions of the GLAD program that I don't really jive with, (particularly the hand motions and potential for singing... blech) but there are other parts that I find really interesting and organized.

Now, I know next to nothing about the program except for what snippets I have seen, but here are my first impressions:

• Organized in the way my brain thinks
• Good for building note-taking skills
• Good for team-building
• Good for motivating
• GREAT opportunities for inquiry-based learning
• students seem to enjoy it and get hands on experience

I realy could go on and on. I like it that much. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Where do you find the resources for the lessons?

2. How difficult would it be to construct your own units based on the GLAD philosophy?