Critical essay on textbooks in a grade 5 level

1. A curriculum is essential to the operation of any school or university. Due to the importance of
curriculum in formal education and the constant changes in our society, curriculum development has
evolved into a dynamic process. Through education, values from one generation are passed on to
subsequent generations. The primary factor in providing learners of various ages with sequential
learning experiences is the curriculum. Textbooks are those materials that are recognized as serving as
the main educational tool for students enrolled in a course or educational unit. The objectives outlined
in the curriculum framework can be achieved in large part thanks to textbooks. The introduction of new
and updated material (learning) and technique is typically supported by the use of new textbooks, which
are most frequently a component of a curriculum revision process. The Grade 5 level is a crucial time for
children because this is where the majority of the material is planned in order to give pupils the
knowledge and abilities they need to excel on the approaching National Grade Six Examination (NGSA)
in the following grade. Therefore, as new generations of learners are encountered, the Language Art
curriculum materials used should be examined and updated to assess their effectiveness. In this paper,
five of such Language Art materials will be critically and comparatively reviewed these are Rainbow
Readers: A Caribbean Reading Series: Reader 5, Fun With Language Book 5, A Process in Learning
Language Arts Level 4 and 5, Understanding English Grammar: Revised Edition and New Junior English
Revised: New Caribbean Edition.
The Rainbow Readers: A Caribbean Reading Series, this book set is used across the curriculum from
Nursery to Primary level in the Caribbean. It is one of the main and daily Language Arts material for
Comprehension, Reading and Vocabulary in the Primary level. The Reader 5 is used in the Grade 5,
published in April of 2002 and composed by Roma Sinanan and Uriel Narinesingh. The Reader 5 includes
fables, folk tales, familiar incidents, factual and literary pieces, both prose and poetry, which is found to
be very enjoyable and stimulating reading materials for pupils. The structure of this text consists of a
number of components that illuminate children’s understanding of the reading material and broaden
their sensitivity to words and it is found to be a crucial material for teachers to help pupils with spelling
and pronunciation of words. Each lesson contains positive and helpful features such as: Words in
Context, which provides pupils with opportunities to find word meanings from the context in which they
appear in the lesson. Understanding the Lesson, this section focuses on questions which provides
opportunity to access pupils’ understanding of the lesson. Children are given opportunities to think and
reason, to draw conclusions, to select main ideas and general themes, identify cause and effect, to
analyse character traits, to develop precision in reading for meaning ad to distinguish between facts and
opinions. Word Skills, in this section, emerge from the reading section: synonyms, antonyms, prefixes,
suffixes, homographs, homophones, syllabication and context clues are taught in meaningful ways.
Values this feature of the reader grows out of the lesson context. In provides children with
opportunities of self-questioning and for making value judgements on situation, actions and characters.
This will undoubtedly exert positive influence on children’s behaviours and attitudes. Further Reading,
this contains material which is related to some aspect of the lesson. This is intended to increase the
children’s knowledge and widen their experience. However despite the numerous positives of this
reader, it also has a few negatives. From my finding, one of such negative is the content of the text is
old and outdated, since printed in 2002, it is 20 years back in time from major events that happened. As
new generations of children passes through the education system most of them have different learning
experiences and exposed to different culture and environmental factor thus they have a difficult time

2. relating to some contents in the text. Another negative is the reading level is too difficult, for the
current batch of students, Covid-19 have been havoc to all global systems including the education
sector. This had devastating effects on the daily classroom instructions with lead to online teaching
which was not accessible by every child during that period. Because of that children had a difficult time
adapting to this new method which subsequently led to learning loss as they return to school post
Covid. Thus, the reading level of the content within the text poses to be of difficulty to the current Grade
5 pupils. Some passages are too lengthy, the pupils get exhausted when they are about six to seven
paragraphs into it and the questions that follows at times poses to be a huge challenge especially for the
average and below average learners. However there are solutions to all the negative aspects of the
reader, firstly, I would suggest that the Rainbow Reader series for Grade 5 needs to be revised, where it
will catch up to the twenty years behind and add more content to suit the present and future
generations of pupils that will be exposed to it thus paving way for the more recent global issues and
events to be added. Additionally, the revision of the text will also solve the issue of the reading level,
making the passages in the reader shorter with the vocabulary level suited for the present age of pupils
and the questions added should be applicable and manageable to all the levels of learners. In conclusion
the Rainbow Readers: A Caribbean Reading Series: Reader 5 is an exceptional reader and a vital
Language Arts material for the pupils and I would recommended to be fully utilized by all teachers in the
Grade 5 level.
Understanding English Grammar: Revised Edition another main Language Arts materials used in the
grade five curriculum mainly for Vocabulary and Grammar. The Understanding English Grammar was
first published in 2004 and revised in 2021 by Steve Gonzalez, where the revised edition was distributed
to schools as one of the many textbooks in the package offered by the Ministry of Education, Guyana to
the NGSA students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The main purpose of this text was to equip the pupils
with knowledge on grammatical rules and content with mastery and revision practice tests to stimulate
learning. Though it was a resource material for the NGSA students, it is also incorporated into the Grade
5 curriculum where as a Grade 5 teacher, I consider this text to be one of the best resource material for
teaching Language Arts in the classroom. Firstly, the well printed and designed layout of the text gives it
an eye-catching look with the various well selected coloured heading, charts, tables and content. In
addition to that the content is well laid out, structured and easy to follow for pupils of different
abilities. The content is explained in the simplest and manageable form for pupils to understand with
simple definitions and plausible examples to support the content. The exercises given are suitable for
the different abilities of learners in my classroom, one of such example, the content on Nouns, the
exercise given, are suited for: firstly the below average pupils, are given exercise to do such as listing
nouns, while the average levelled pupils are given sentences for them to read and underline nouns and
finally the above average pupils are given paragraphs to read and select all the nouns stated in such.
That is one of the major standout of this text from my findings and experience utilizing it. Finally ‘the
icing to the cake’, the well-structured and engaging mastery and revision test that concludes the text.
This provides the pupils with extra exercises for them to practice on, it tests their knowledge on what
they grasped from the contents within the text. Each test consist of fifteen question each of different
topics, so they are expected to be au fait with all areas across the text to manage these tests. With the
text being a vital material for the Language Arts classroom, it also has a few negatives. One of such from
my finding is small font size, this can several impact pupils who are visually impaired. They would have a
hard time trying to read words and sentences, I have noticed some of my pupils squinting and bring the
text closer to their eyes to aid reading. The font size with also contribute to pupils with visual dyslexia,

3. with the clustered words for some examples and small font sizes, letters may appear to move or change
shape which the text doesn’t take into consideration. Another negative is the limited topics provided in
the text, the topics provided doesn’t cover the full scope of the grade 5 curriculum. Some of these topics
omitted are literary devices, idioms, proverbs, alphabetical order, acronyms and abbreviation. These
topics are very important for grade 5 pupil and are usually the ones they have the most difficulties with.
However, these negatives can be rectified, the text can further be revised once more where the issues
of the font size can be easily solved by increasing the font size of the words to account for pupils with
visual problems and also the topics omitted can also be added to text as well during the revision process
thus making it an even more effective Language Arts material. In conclusion the Understanding English
Grammar: Revised Edition is another exceptional Language Arts material for the pupils and I would
recommended to be fully utilized by all teachers in the Grade 5 level.