Intervention Plan

I recently wrote a reading intervention plan for my Teaching Reading course. For this assignment, I was asked to choose a struggling reader from my classroom and, using the assessments Terri or I had administered to him, plan a three-to-four-week intervention that addresses his biggest reading hurdles. Click on the link below to see the plan:

Intervention Plan

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SIPPS Update

My reading interventions are going really well. All three students are making progress and seem to enjoy themselves. I only meet with each of them for about 20 minutes a day, which is a perfect amount of time for these particular students. They’re all high energy and find it difficult to focus for long periods of time. I’ve finished setting up the small room where we’re meeting.

It has been so encouraging to see these students improving in their reading even just in the last two weeks. They’re doing a great job of remembering the sight words and letter sounds they’ve learned. Two of them confuse “b” with “d” and both of them have made great strides with that, correcting themselves every time they say “b” instead of “d,” or vice versa. Earlier this week, I asked each of them to tell me their personal reading goals. I asked them what kinds of books they would most like to read all by themselves. They gave me answers like Junie B. Jones, Magic Tree House, and Dr. Seuss. I wrote their goals on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper with colorful sharpies and let them decorate their own goal sheets with whatever designs and colors they wanted.

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SIPPS work

While talking to my mom on the phone the other day, I was given a genius suggestion. Why not work with all three reading intervention kids separately? I have a 50-minute block of time, from 11-11:50, so why shouldn’t I just take each of them out for 15 minutes? That way they would miss less class time, and I would have the chance to work one-on-one with them. I tried this method today and loved it. The kids responded much better to one-on-one instruction. Their behavior was nearly perfect, except for toward the end of their individual sessions when they got a little antsy, which I expected. I’m excited to do it this way not only because I believe that behavior will shape up, but also because all of them learn best at different paces. As of today, one of them is about four lessons ahead of everyone else. I accelerated him through some of the lessons because I could tell that much of what we were doing was review for him. Either that or he was catching on very quickly.

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Reading intervention time!

We’re finally starting a reading intervention with our three non-readers. The program we’re using is called SIPPS, and I’ve been entrusted with teaching it. It’s going to be quite the challenge, I think, because these three students are also three of the most difficult students behaviorally-speaking. One of them argues with everything I say and has terrible listening skills; another makes sound effects, crawls on tables, and can’t stop moving; the last one is openly defiant and makes noises when I’m trying to talk. Despite their behavior, I really am excited to try this out, because they’re so desperately in need of reading instruction. WCHE’s literary specialist has been working with me this week, helping me understand the program and how to teach it. Admittedly, I feel slightly inadequate because I’ve never been given extensive training for this kind of thing, and the literacy specialist won’t be around to help me after this week. But I have the SIPPS manual, and it’s really straightforward, so I’m confident I can do it.

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DID Day

Today there was no school but all teachers attended a staff meeting in the morning from 8:30 to 10:30. By the end of that meeting, we had devised a SIP (School Improvement Plan) and had the subsequent task of gathering in our grade-level bands (K-1, 2-3-4, 5-6) to discuss and write down the ways in which the SIP will be implemented in our classrooms. I can’t remember the exact wording of the SIP, but its main focus is language development. Our school has so many ELL students, and there is a definite need for a focus on vocabulary and comprehension of text so that our students will be on their way to higher-level thinking. So, for the next few years, White Center Heights will be working on improving in that area.

When we met in our bands, we talked about how to incorporate language development in math, reading, and writing. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade teachers relied on a book called Comprehension through Conversation to create their basic reading plan for the year. Our literacy specialist also mentioned a book called To Understand that she loves and highly recommends. I love hearing about excellent books, and I always immediately want to run out and buy them to add to my growing collection of teacher resources.

I can see now why teacher in-service days are important. They allow helpful planning to take place. I, for one, feel more confident about this coming year now that we’ve come up with concrete ways in which we can teach the three main subjects.

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Reading interventions

Okay, so now we’ve finished DIBELS testing. The other two booklets came in, and I tested our last two students. Terri used the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark system to determine what level each student is at (A, B, C, etc.). For our daily Reading Workshop, we have now paired up students who are close in level and asked them to “partner read”. Out of necessity, there are several partner groups that have three people. The partner reading has been going really well. We’ve been surprised to see that our students are more on task while doing that than they were reading independently.

We’re hoping to start pulling 3 or 4 kids into small reading groups in a few weeks. This will eventually happen during Centers, which is a time where the students are asked to work on a specific activity that they’re already familiar with and can therefore do independently. Once we’ve practiced Centers enough, Terri and I will use that block of time (20-25 minutes) to work on reading with a small group of kids. There are several students who really need that extra one-on-one or one-on-two reading interaction. For those who are extremely low, we’re hoping to see even more remedial attention from the people who work with students who have IEPs. Right now, our two students with IEPs are only pulled out about three hours a week, which is not even close to enough. Terri was telling me that she hopes they’ll start “pushing in,” which means that someone would come into the classroom and work individually with one of our IEP students without pulling them from their normal environment.

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