Reading Intervention Activities

Reading Intervention Activities 

Hey friends! Are you tired of searching high and low for reading intervention strategies for your struggling readers? I was too! So I teamed up with my amazing friend  Karen Mallard to bring you a post about running records and reading intervention activities for the classroom.

Reading Intervention Tips

The question we hear so much is, where do I start with my  reading intervention program? The answer is simple: assessments. Reading intervention must start with assessment. Teachers must know what areas students are struggling  with so they can meet their needs effectively. 

Once you assess students, use the data to identify those students who are at risk. Then, be sure  to monitor their progress often. Struggling readers should be assessed at least bi weekly, if not weekly.

After you’ve assessed the student, it’s important to analyze the running record. Running records give the teachers so much information. 

Self-Corrections in Struggling Readers

A topic that we have been discussing at school recently has been self-correction rates.  Some teachers asked for guidance so I gave them some guidelines.  I also think that if a student has a 1:1 ratio but has more than 5 errors that were self-corrected the child is working way too hard.  Analyze the errors and look at the information the student is neglecting.  Is it a weakness in decoding left to right, or a lack of high-frequency word vocabulary?  Address the weakness so the child becomes a more accurate and confident reader. Students who struggle with sight words or high frequency words, can practice those daily using sight word games! These make their learning fun and the kids enjoy them so much!

Self-Correction Rates

1:1 Excellent

1:2 Good

1:3 Fair

1:4 and higher show that the student isn’t monitoring consistently.

Is the student noticing that it doesn’t sound right, make sense, or look right?

Is the student self-correcting with only one source of information and ignoring the others?

The goal is to be flexible and to use all of the cues/information together. (Meaning-pictures, Structure-language, Visual-letters.)

Errors In Reading

Errors in reading are a common issue. It’s important to look for patterns with errors. Are students only having errors with proper nouns? Do they struggle with reading all the way through the word? Think about why you think the student is making the error. This is crucial to figure out how to drive the instruction.

In the primary grades, students sometimes learn a strategy I call “Guess and GO”. These students are looking at the beginning of the word, and guessing on the rest. They do not read through the middle of the word.

  

Sometimes students will have errors similar to guessing, like this:

was/saw

here/her

us/use

Whenever students have these errors, I show them both words. I ask the students if they can see how the words are different and how they are the same. We discuss the meaning of each word  and then use instructional strategies from our intervention binders to help fix it. We use these instructional strategies in our small group instruction to help students make progress in their independent reading levels. 

In our binders, we've included running records that you are analyzed to help you learn how to properly use running records as a data point for your students. This has been so helpful to so many of our colleagues!

Through the intervention binders , students practice skills that they are weak in every single day. This gives students the opportunity to practice the instructional skills they need in order to help close their achievement gap.  If you have questions about how often you should do reading intervention, ask me over here. 

  

Reading Assessment Drives Instruction

Hey friends! Reading intervention has ALWAYS been a large part of our day, but I feel like in the last 3-4 years, it's become so much more. General education teachers are now as skilled as reading specialists in some areas! We have so much thrown on us that we pick up and learn different strategies and ways to teach students. Our country has become so "data driven"...but is this a good thing or not??Thoughts? I'd love to hear how you feel about data!  Sound in on my Facebook page. 

I'm working on a series of blog posts regarding Reading Intervention. For today, I want to discuss assessments.

Reading Assessment

The purpose for assessment is to develop a base line for your students. When I first started teaching, I would only test on sight words or rhyming words. I would test in chunks. Now, I do the entire reading assessment at the beginning of the year. This gives me the entire picture of where the student is at and a great place to start with my instruction.

I teamed up with my literacy coach, Karen Mallard, to come up with different ways to help the struggling kiddos. One thing that has helped my students so much was focusing on what words they needed to know in order to advance to a certain levels. We have to assess the students word knowledge before beginning instruction, so these tools are very helpful because everything is right there for you.

After I've analyzed the data, we focus on the words in this list as their "priority" sight words. These are words we feel like the students have to know in order to advance to to next reading level. Students need to learn a TON of sight words, but this is my starting point. The activities in the binder reinforce learning the skills. Shown above and below are the sight word assessments. The binders include assessments for all of the components of reading: Formative Beginning Sound Assessment, Rhyming Assessment, Sight Word Assessments (Reading Levels A-F), Word Awareness, Syllables, Fluency and Comprehension. Once you have assessed students, the binders include activities to instruct students.

The binders include a variety of activities to help students recognize these words.

My students LOVE Three in a Row!!

Stay tuned for more posts about reading intervention! In the meantime, check out the feedback from our intervention binders for grades K-4!! You can check them out here!

Math Intervention Activities

Hey friends! I don't know about y'all but the end is near! We have about 5 weeks left of school..FIVE! Seems like the year has just flown by.

Math Intervention Tips

I wanted to share with you some math interventions that really helped our lessons in math become easy for us!  I've used this year. As y'all know, I follow a guided math model in my classroom. My student are working in math stations or centers while I'm working with student who struggle in the target  skill. With some of my students, I practiced number sense all.year.long. It has helped them grow into strong little math stars! 

We've used this Math Intervention Binder this year and it's been a huge help. Best part is, there's very little prep! I just printed it and stuck it in page protectors. It's so great for small group or one on one instruction. My favorite thing about this binder, is that when it comes to data, I always had a list of the interventions I've tried. The neat thing about teachers, is that we ALL do interventions and we all have our own little tricks that help. So I feel like you can never have enough because you never know what will work for each little friend.

Math Intervention Binder

This Math Intervention Binder is divided up into the following sections: 

Number Sense, Shapes, Patterns, Place Value, Addition Strategies, Subtraction Strategies,  Graphing, Greater than/Less than, Time and Money! I started at beginning of the binder and worked my way through each page with my RTI students. This way I have direct documentation to specific interventions I've used. It makes data collection SO much easier!

This activity is so helpful because the students can visually see the number and the different ways we can break it down. The great thing is, you can use ANY number you want! I have used a variety of manipulative for this, but by far, my kids love using the big buttons. I have no idea why, but hey, it works so I use it!!  In this activity, we practiced building the number 7 in a variety of ways. I wanted my friend to see all of the different ways we can make the number seven. Using two different color manipulatives helps too. 

I want my students to develop a very strong sense of numbers. They should be able to explain what each number means and the different ways you can create it.I like to let them use their imagination on how many different ways we can get the same number. Let them talk, and let them explain what each number means!!  Once they get this, they are able to blossom in the other strands of math. 

The activity above is great because we combine reading with math. Before this binder, my students always struggle with reading and writing number words. We start these activities in the beginning and they are consistently using these skills throughout the year!! 

The point and say activities are great because of the variety of numbers included. Reading numbers is so important to developing a strong understanding of number sense.

The counting pages are also so helpful! It's nice to have everything in one spot and to be able to decide the pages you want to use.

Addition strategies are my favorite! My kiddos LOVED these! 

More number sense practice

                                            

*Number sense- breaking down numbers and understanding what numbers mean, counting, recognizing and identifying numbers, writing numerals to 10, writing numbers to 20, 30, 50, and 100, describing numbers, skip counting by 2's, 5's, 10's , color and count, dice number recognition, number words, find and color, and many more!

*Shapes- Students will work on identifying 2d shapes. Shapes included: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, hexagon, octagon, pentagon, heptagon, star, heart, diamond, oval. (10 Pages)

*Patterns~Pattern Anchor Charts, Create a Pattern, Pattern For Square (10 Pages)

*Place Value- Hundreds, Tens and Ones number practice, anchor charts, break it down practice pages

*Addition Strategies~ Addition assessments, Zero's the name, Addition Allie, Draw it!, Doubles, Doubles plus one 

*Subtraction Strategies~ Subtraction Sam, Number Line is All Mine, and Draw it, subtraction assessments

*Counting Coins~ Coin posters, coin match ups, individual counting mats, individual coin counting, combination coin counting, and more!  

 The money section includes 25 pages.  The visual aides and desk references are great for students who need a lot of visual cues and support. 

I used this in the binder AND as a desk reference for some of my kiddos.

We practiced counting coins nearly ALL year long. Next year, this will be a skill I start right away instead of waiting until after Christmas. I thought  that by starting after Christmas I would still be ahead of the pacing guide, so my kids would have more time to practice..but I think they would benefit from starting at the beginning of the year to give them more time with this difficult concept. 

*Telling Time~ Students have a variety of ways to practice telling time and a fun little story to go along with your intervention groups!

Click HERE or any picture to go check out the binder. 

Here's another look inside our binder

https://youtu.be/xjxo236aJS0

Our  second grade math binder has many of the same concepts. Our second grade teachers have really seen a lot of growth using this binder.