Getting Creative!

Despite what many might think...guided reading is not the answer to everything in reading intervention! I have a particularly challenging group of first graders this year. They are really struggling. I have been re-evaluating my instruction and making some creative choices!

Now, before you call blasphemy, I still instruct these students with a heavy dose of guided reading in the morning, but in the afternoon we really let loose. Here are some of the things I have been doing with my students:

Poems

We have been doing a weekly poem. This provides a lot of repetition and fluency practice. I have been choosing poems that work on specific sight words to help increase automaticity. The kids really enjoy the rhyming and melodic qualities of the poems. A poem is also significantly less overwhelming than a book and gives struggling students access to grade level content.

This is a great resource for finding sight word poems. They are organized around different sight words and skills, such as breaking words into chunks.

After reading the poem for a couple of days, I remove some of the sight words and have students practice adding them back to the poem. We also take turns reading with the pointer.

 
Writing
I am a firm believer that writing needs to be incorporated into reading instruction. Sometimes we compose an interactive writing  based around the content of that week's poem. Other times, we compose our own poem based upon a template of the week's poem. We have also written cut up sentences and switched with partners.

Phonics Games
I love playing file folder phonics games. My district is heavy into Fundations, but sometimes a scripted program just doesn't get the job done for everyone. Nothing beats a good old fashioned game. Right now we are working on r-controlled vowels. I am starting to see progress!

This is one of my favorites!

Sight Word Movement Games
We have been so busy having fun in the gym, that I keep forgetting to take pictures! We have been playing sight word basketball and sight word relay races. They are so simple, but the kids love them. Students must identify a sight word before they shoot the basketball or before they start their leg of the relay. A competitve edge is highly motivating. I carefully select the teams so they are equally matched and each race is very close.. That way no one is too upset or discouraged.

How do you get creative with your struggling students?

Word Attack Strategies!

When I work with my students during guided reading, I really focus on helping them develop good "word attack" strategies. I keep this anchor chart up for them to refer to. When they are stuck on a word, I always ask,"What strategy are you going to try?" Sometimes it takes more than one, but usually the strategies get the job done! After reading together, we even added another one (after I took this picture). The fifth one is: Look for chunks you know. This has actually ended up being one of the most popular ones! So here is a quick list of the strategies we use:

1. Look at the picture.

2. What would make sense?

3. Look at the beginning letter.

4. Skip it, read to the end of the sentence, then go back.

5. Look for chunks you know.

I use these strategies with all the grade levels I work with. I have really been pushing the strategies with my third graders. They wanted to sound out every word! I told them now that we were reading harder books, the words were getting too long to sound out. My third graders are also still working on learning several phonics rules, so their sounding out often was not successful. To break them of this "sounding out habit," I made a checklist.

I made a small list of the strategies for each student to have in front of them. I laminated the strategies so that students could check off the strategies with a dry erase marker as they used them. It has been a huge success! I am so pleased! My students are really starting to use these strategies instead of sounding out. I find it very interesting how certain students favor different strategies. Some students prefer to use a couple of the strategies over and over, whereas other students like to use every single one in a book. Differentiation at its finest, right?!

If you would like a copy of the strategies, click here, or on the picture above. I hope your students find them as useful as mine do!

What word attack strategies do you use with your students?

Reading Strategy File Folder

Today's post is just a quick little explanation of one of my favorite activities from the amazing Debbie Miller. Is anyone else out there completely in awe of the wonderful Debbie Miller? I had the privilege of seeing her speak at a conference my first year teaching and loved every minute of her session. We studied her book Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades in great detail in my college classes.

I really love how she gradually fosters independence in her students with the key reading strategies. My post today focuses on an idea found in her second book Teaching with Intention. The activity is very simple, but my students loved it!

The first thing you need is some file folders. (I thought purple added a little flair!) Using a permanent marker, I divided the file folder into four sections: 

1. What we think we know
2. New Learning
3. Questions
4. Misconceptions

After I finished labeling the different sections, I laminated all of the file folders, for durability. In her activity, Debbie Miller used full sized post-its, but I found that the mini post-its worked better for my students. 

This activity works well for most nonfiction texts. To begin, I have my students record what they think they know on post-its. We label it as what we think we know because sometimes students have misconceptions about a topic. If we find this to be the case, we simply move the post-it to the misconception section later on. 

Then, students write questions they have about the topic. We also pause throughout the reading to add more questions. When we are pausing, we also add information to the new learning section. As we go along, we move any post-its that turned out to be misconceptions. (Sorry for the glare!)

I found that this activity really got my students to focus on their own thinking during their reading. They also were really excited to use file folders and post-its. It's the simple things right? Some of my favorite texts to use for this activity are articles from Ranger Rick  magazine. 

Thanks for another hit Debbie Miller! Is anyone else out there a huge Debbie Miller fan? If not, who do you admire?