My Week in Focus: Reading Resource

In an effort to be more focused this year in blogging, I want to return to doing some of  my favorite posts and adding a new post.  The new series of posts will be My Week in Focus.  Focus is my word for this 2016 and a way for me to stay focused in blogging is to commit to doing something weekly in relation to my blog.  My Week in Focus will be a post about something in my classroom that I focused on doing or fixing for that week.  So without further ado...


In the past I have taught several resources classes during the day, but because of the needs of the students on my caseload, I am doing more coteaching and less resource and one of my special ed team colleagues is helping with a majority of my resource times, because there is just not enough time in the day to do everything alone. 

In one of my resource class times, I have 3 students reading with a strong focus on comprehension.  I have tried several different resources with this group of students to help them learn and understand basic comprehension skills...some things have worked and other things have been a flop!  As a group, the comprehension skills of these students (all fourth graders) are at least two years behind their peers, but their reading ability (how they decode words) is at or above grade level.  This makes for quite the challenge, because I want them to read book that are appropriate reading ability, but not so far over their head in comprehension that they get no meaning from the story. 

I started out by doing a running record on each student and seeing what level they are on in reading and as I expected the reading ability was much higher than the comprehension skills.  If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you know my love for Reading A-Z and Raz Kids, and you know my love for technology.  After I determined guided reading level, I assigned each of these students to a Raz Kids account.  Each student uses Raz Kids at least twice a week during their time in resource with me and will use it at extra times when I need to work one on one with one of my students from this group.  I love the information I can get from progress reports online.  I know the exact areas of comprehension my students are struggling with and I can tailor my lessons to address these areas.  Below you can see one students comprehension skills report:

I can look at this report and know that I need to meet with this student to zone in on main idea and details!

Another resource that has become an invaluable tool in what I use during this resource group is the comprehension packs from Teaching Special Thinkers.  These are all picture books with accompanying visuals and comprehension questions.  The books are engaging for this group of students and the visuals help aid in comprehension.  As we preview the book, we discuss the title, characters and setting and while we read we add the visuals to the story map in the correct order.  Each comprehension question has multiple choice answers in word and visual format. 

Photo Credit: Teaching Special Thinkers

Get your copy: here

Finally, borrowing the idea from my friend at Teaching Special Thinkers, I use the story map to help aid in comprehension of grade level trade books.  Right now, the 4th grade class is reading Tuck Everlasting.  That book is pretty deep for any fourth grader, but especially for my students.  Listening to a chapter read aloud is hard for my students to do and make meaning from.  Most of the comprehension of this book comes from classroom discussion.  This can be difficult for my students.  I use adapted books and visuals for our story map to help them read and understand harder text and to be able to access same curriculum and texts as their peers.  (On another post, I promise to share more about adapting grade level reading text!)

~Kim

Oh "Appy" Day: Tech on Tuesday: March 4

Today's app is FREE (Hurry though...it's free for Read Across America Day)!!  And wonderful!!!

When I began this year, I had to buy all new books for my classroom library because I've never had a classroom of my own.  I've always inherited whatever classroom library books were in the library and therefore didn't own many of my own books.  When this year started, I had to stock a whole classroom library.  Most of the books on my shelves come from ebay and from yard sales!  Great books and even better deals!

With that being said, we didn't get into our brand new building until just right before school started.  I put together my library, but I had many more pressing issues to organize and work on to be ready for the first day, so the ole library was thrown together and forgotten about. :(
That is until I found this app and this resource!  Match made in picture book heaven!!

Literacy Leveler is a book leveling app that helps students choose books that are on their reading level.  It gives you information Lexile levels, DRA levels, and Guided Reading levels!  I am so excited about this!  I cannot wait to level all of my library books!  All of this information is at your fingertips when you scan the bar code or type in the ISBN number on the book!

This resource is available on TPT (click the image to be directed to the link).  I recently purchased this beauty and now I'm ready to print and label my book bins!  

I can't wait to share my new and improved library with you guys!! :)

A Look Inside: Resource Reading-Organization

This is the last post in this series.  Sad day! :(  I've really enjoyed actually posting 5 days in a row!  This is something that usually does not happen during the school year!  I'm trying to do better, friends! :)

Finally, we have made it to organization.  After all of the lessons are planned, interventions are put in place and schedules are created and followed the next important piece of this reading resource puzzle is monitoring and organization.

Here is what I monitor weekly for each student in each area:
Fluency: A fluency chart is used so the students can see their progress.  The beginning of the week WPM is graphed on Monday and then on Friday the student graphs the WPM for that day.

Comprehension: I take a score on the comprehension quiz provided with the guided reading lesson on Reading A-Z.  If I didn't use one of these lessons for the week I would create 10 comprehension questions based on what we are reading at the time.

Basic Skills/Accuracy:  I take a score/percentage on the sight word from week.  I also take a score on the sound/sounds they are working on for the week.  For example, if they are working on long e sound I would give them several words with the long e sound in them and see if they can sound out the words.

All of this information is then put in one of two places.
1.  I record the percentages in a data graph.
2.  The work samples are kept in hanging file folder box.

Lastly, I keep a reading binder on my entire reading resource group.  It includes:
1.  A literacy assessment profile
2.  Student group planning page (based on IEP goals)
3.  Guided reading planning pages
4.  Reading conference log

I have complied these resources and many other ideas into a handy Guided Reading for the Resource Classroom guide for you that is available on TPT.

This guide is chock full of resource to help assess, guide, plan, and instruct students that receive reading services in the resource classroom or reading intervention.

Assessment:
Literacy Assessment Profile
Reading Interest Inventory
Boy
Girl

Planning:
Guided Reading planning page
Student Reading Group Planning (Based on IEP goal)
Example group planning page
Reading Conference Log

Instruction:
Word Work ideas
Intervention How-To ideas
Time Delay Data
Time Delay Data Example
Cue Cards for word attack skills
Comprehension Graphic Organizers
Check for Understanding
Main Idea
Visualizing Map
KWL Chart
Story Map

For the Kids:
Reading Log
Vocabulary Catcher

I hope you have found this series of blog post helpful and I also hope that you check out my guided reading resource.
Check out the whole series of posts:
Planning
Assessment
Intervention
Management

I'm linking up these Guided Reading series of blog posts with The Teacher's Cauldron!  Stop by her blog to see some other great guided reading tools and ideas!

Kim

   

A Look Inside: Resource Reading-Management

Planning is complete!  Right?  Well, not-so-much!  Now that instruction is planned the next step is to set up and manage the instruction and instructional activities.  I think the best way for me to explain to you what my classroom looks like is to go through my schedule with you.

I have a resource reading group for grades 3, 4, and 5 for one hour.  It began with me having the kids for 40 minutes for reading and then at a later time having most of them back for 20 minutes for writing.  Then one day I had an epiphany!  If I combined both of these times it would be liking killing two birds with one stone!  I could service the students for reading and writing in one larger block of time and tie together reading and writing with my guided lessons and form literacy groups.

Perfect!  So, with little tweaking of the schedule I now have 9 kids for one hour for reading and writing.  While it is true that some of these friends do not have writing goals, they could still use the extra support in writing.  I make a point that my students with writing goals that when I meet with those students during teacher time that we address writing specific goals and they finish the writing center work for my monitoring purposes.

My schedule goes like this:

15 minutes-Whole group guided reading lesson
     (during this time the students are actively engaged with me and we are working on the reading strategy for the week and comprehension strategies)

15 minutes-Students go to their first rotation
Some will go to word work or the writing center, some will buddy read, and the others will go to the listening center.  All of this goes on while I pull one on one (or sometimes groups of 2 or 3) for direct instruction/intervention in their greatest area of need.  I work with them on fluency, basic reading strategies, Corrective Reading, or sight word recognition.

15 minutes-Students go to 2nd rotation
Again students do one of the three groups as stated above or they are coming to me.

10-15 minutes-Students will go to final rotation
This rotation often includes silent reading or read to self time.  By this rotation, students have finished the work that needs to be completed in the centers.  I may still be meeting with a few students to finish up one on one time.

The last 5 minutes is a wrap up time.  Students have a time to tell me what they have learned during that day and how they are doing on the target for the day/week.

Side Notes:  If a student finishes in a rotation before time is up, then the student may silent read, practice sight words silently, or reread their fluency passage for the week.
The student know which rotation they are going to do daily because it is programmed on their individual visual schedules that I posted about yesterday.

Each day my students are required to do fluency practice and work with teacher time.  The teacher time though is not necessarily a rotation, but instead happens as I call them over.
I am really enjoying the literacy stations so far.  This is giving my students some independence and making them responsible for their learning.  The students are engaged and doing work they enjoy.

A Look Inside: Resource Reading-Interventions

Day 3: Intervention

Assessments are complete, lesson planning for the overall reading strategy and the story of the week has been chosen, but planning is not over yet.  Like I said yesterday, the most important part of resource reading is meeting individual needs and monitoring those IEP goals.  

Meeting individual goals of 8-10 kids at a time is not an easy task.  Everyone of the students needs me just as much as the next kid and they are all struggling with some part of reading.  Here is where interventions and having a very structured schedule come into play.  I'll begin with the interventions:

1.  Reading Fluency:

On Monday of each week my students "cold" read (this means they have never seen or read the passage before Monday) a passage.  The students are timed for one minute and we record their words per minute on their fluency graph.  Each day each student has the opportunity to listen to weekly passage being read aloud to them, timing their reading with a buddy, recording themselves reading into the iPad, and rereading and rereading this passage.  I read the passage daily with them as well, to make sure they can read all of the words and to work on accuracy strategies.  On Friday, each student does a one minute "hot" read of the passage and the words per minute are recorded on the graph next to the "cold" read words per minute.

The students also have a chance to choose books of their own interest to read during a read to self time/silent reading time.  The students keep the same books all week and reread the books to gain familiarity and become more fluent readers.  I do use the Daily 5 strategies in my classroom, but I do not always stick exactly to the plan.  I have modified it to make it work for my resource classroom.  

2.  Accuracy/Basic Reading:

After completing the FRY Informal Assessments, I give my students the words from the sight word list that they did not know.  They have 10 words a week.  The students come to me once a day and practice their sight words by using the time delay strategy.  Students also work on these words during Word Work time.  They become fluent with the pronunciation and spelling of the words during this time while working kinesthetically on the words to learn them.

I also do reading conferences during teacher time.  I read one on one with each student (at least weekly from a book of my choosing or their choosing).  During this time we work on reading strategies such as chunking the sounds in words to sound out a word, employing phonetic principles, and other strategies for learning to read words.

With some of my students I use SRA Corrective Reading.  This program helps the students relearn the phonics that they may have missed or didn't understand the first time around.  The program is very structured.  I do not use it with everyone, as they do not all need the intensiveness of this program.  I do use the program daily with the students that need it.

3.  Comprehension:

Our main comprehension lessons come from the weekly book and guided reading lesson.  We work on one comprehension strategy weekly.  I use an assortment of graphic organizers with the students to help them gain better understanding of the text they read.

These are the main interventions that I use weekly.  Obviously this is not an exhaustive list, but it does give a general idea of what I use.  Something you may be thinking now is, "How does she get this all in in one hour?"

My answer...literacy groups!

Just like in Daily 5 the students are going to cycle through stations.  We may not get to 5 stations daily, but throughout the week the students will do all stations.

Daily each student does:

Whole group comprehension lesson

Teacher Time

Fluency (Listening to Reading or Buddy Read)

Weekly students do:

Word Work

Writing Work

Additional reteach of the comprehension lesson (I determine this if the students are not "testing" correctly on their comprehension exit slip)

iPad or other technology related center

Let me break it down to ya about what each station is about:

The whole group comprehension lesson is a guided reading lesson.  The topic for the lesson comes from the general education curriculum.  After each lesson students turn in an exit slip so that I can keep track of whether or not they are understanding the concept.

Teacher Time is the time that I meet with students individually or possibly in groups of two or three.  The students work on Corrective Reading (if needed), sight word practice, reading conferences, and reading their fluency passage.

Fluency stations include listen to reading.  The students may choose to listen to a recorded version of their passage or read with a buddy.  The buddy times the student that is reading and each time they read the student reading is trying to beat his best time.  

My word work comes from my guided reading lesson plus the sight words that my students are working on.  Sometimes I have students that test through their grade level sight word list.  If this happens we sometimes go to the next list, plus we add on words that they have made errors on during our reading conference time.  

Writing work also coincides with the guided reading lesson.  

I love incorporating technology anyway that I can, so iPad or technology is a center that we use very often.  The students all have Lexia Reading accounts and as a group we go to the computer lab to work on their program.  Lexia is a paid computer program that individualizes learning for each student.  It is a great resource to have!

I have created a Literacy Groups for the Resource Room pack that is available through TpT.  In this pack are visuals for each center, customizable schedules, and directions for each center.

Here are a few pictures of it at work in my classroom:

Read to Self and Buddy Reading

Both of these are in the same area, because students can choose where they sit for both activities.  I needed a space to put the posters so they could refer to the expectations and use the visual schedule cards.  This is right next to my library, so student are able to pick books if they need to do so.

Work with Teacher

Work on Writing Center

Sorry, I tried every which way, but I could not get this picture to stay turned!  :)  Anyway...these are the customizable visual schedules.  The students are given a schedule daily and match their visual cue with the large visual posters seen above.  As the student visits each center, he/she removes that visual and places it on the poster size visual to show that have been there that day.

If you would like a copy of the Literacy Groups Visuals, please visit my TPT store!

Enjoy! :)

Kim

A Look Inside: Resource Reading-Assessment

Day 2:  Assessment 

Now that planning for the Common Core is out of the way, it's time to get down to what really matters to me the most in the resource classroom...meeting individual needs!  I begin my looking at each student's IEP and seeing what strengths and weaknesses each student has, particularly in the area of reading in this instance.  As mentioned in the previous post, my students that I work with for resource reading have difficulty in one or all three areas of reading, comprehension, accuracy (basic reading), and fluency.

After I determine which area the student is having difficulty in and what goals and benchmarks that I will need to monitor, I begin doing reading assessments.   I typically do assessments within the first week of school, so that I begin groups right away.  

Here is a list of assessments that I use to measure each area of reading (and this gives me great baseline data):

In no way have been paid to endorse, sponsor, or review these products.  I am just giving you the facts and letting you know what I personally like to use for assessing my students.

School-wide:

We give the MAP test from NWEA as our school-wide reading screener.  This test gives me an accurate depiction of the student in all areas of reading.  I use these scores and the data that comes from this test to determine groupings and to easily sees areas of weakness and strength.

Comprehension & Basic Reading Skills:

Dr. Fry's Informal Reading Assessment is my go-to book for assessment for reading skills!

This book has a silent reading test that measures comprehension.  Sometimes I read the test to the students that have greater difficulty with basic reading skills, but I do not prompt, cue or eliminate any answers.  Students must answer the questions on their own.  

The book also includes sight word assessment and benchmark passages to help determine instructional and frustration levels of reading.

I use SRA Corrective Reading with my students that are lacking in basic reading skills and accuracy of calling words.  This program is expensive, but I have seen the success of it with my own eyes! This program comes with its own assessment.  It assesses what the student knows and direct your instruction by placing the student in the correct level of book.  In the beginning it mainly focuses on basic reading skills and phonemic awareness, but eventually moves on to comprehension.

Fluency:

I love Jen Jones and her blog and plethora of resources that she makes available.  For fluency this year I have downloaded her RTI: 60 Fluency Passages for Progress Monitoring Reading Skills and Interventions.  

I have used the passages from this document to assess baseline fluency targets.  I use the information from this assessment and find other fluency passages for the students to work on weekly.  My students may need to spend more time in grade level 1 passages than what is available in this resource, so I look for those extra passages at Reading A-Z.  You all know how much I love this website!!

After I have collected all my data, I set up monitoring sheets and for each area of need and then begin the fun work of...teaching!! :)

Until tomorrow...

Kim

PS-Click on the pictures for the links to each resource