Fluency

Not a moment goes by that RtI teachers are not thinking about fluency. Number fluency, reading fluency...It is the major way we measure our students' progress. Some of my favorite activities to build fluency happen during my warm ups. Sometimes students time themselves reading sightword flashcards. They keep track of their progress on personal bar graphs. They are super excited when their progress looks like a staircase heading up, up... Not so much when it is a staircase headed down, down, down ;) Fluency powerpoints are another easy way to build up sight word fluency. My students love being first to shout out the words on the screen. Here are some great ones at all the grade levels:

Sight Word Power Points

There are lots of other ones out there if you check it out. More fluency activites to come...

Making it Work Mondays- Sentence Starters for Reading Comprehension

How can we help our ELL and struggling learners in our classrooms? Sentence starters! They encourage our kids to use complete sentences. It give our struggling students a way to begin to organize their thoughts. It helps student begin to use new vocabulary. I found some great resources online and created a few posters I will use with my small groups. Let's hear it for sentence starters!!!
Sentence Starter Cards

Reading Strategies/Sentence Starters

Friday- Week's Round Up

I have gotten lots of great new ideas this week.
Two of the tops: silent signals and SLANT...both from an awesome teacher in Oakland, Ms. Noonan. Woo hoo, let's hear it for Bay Area teachers!

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/classroom-silent-communication-signals

Thinking Thursday

One of the best parts about being a teacher is being able to start fresh each new school year. Somewhat unintentionally, I begin each year with a new focus. This year I am try to think of new ways I can motivate my students; in my classroom and then back in their homerooms. As a Response to Intervention teacher, my students are kids that have failed over and over again. Some of these students have never passed an assessment. It is amazing that many still try their best.  Last year I focused on motivating students by getting to know them, letting them know I cared about them. When picking them up from their classrooms I was sure to ask about their weekends, families etc. Even though our group times were short, 30 minutes, I spent time letting students share stories and connections with what we were reading.
This year I would like to focus on helping students make their own goals. I saw this bulletin board idea and loved it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/venosdale/3844681997/

I created a similar board  and will have students write goals for the new school year on the stars.

What are the ways you will motivate students this year?

Wordy Wednesday-Word Maps and Visual Vocabulary

As reading teachers, we all know the importance of teaching vocabulary. Having more than one strategy in your toolbox is important when you are working with struggling learners. Last year, my students struggled to recall the meaning of words we were working on. They had an easier time learning new words when exposed to them in different ways. Two of my favorite activities were word maps and visual vocabulary.

Visual Vocabulary is an easy activity that the kids love. I had students divide their notebook paper into two columns. In column 1, we wrote the word and its meaning. In the next column, students created a picture that helped them remember the word. Easy, right? My students seem to recall the meaning of words and also were practicing the important skill of visualizing.

Word maps help students build important connections in order to remember and use new words. Sometimes for our word maps I would just write a word we focusing in center of chart paper and students would work together to come up with as many associations as they could and write them down. For example, our word was ancient and students wrote the pyramids, fossils, my teacher :) etc. Other times I used graphic organizers. Here is a link to one of my favorites:

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/word_maps/

What are your favorite ways to teach new vocabulary?