This week, I was attending a professional development where the deeper areas of reading development were being discussed. In the Lansing School District, students reading development is a hot button issue right now. Theories were being presented, in which the varying needs of the students in the class could be addressed. Many of the comments in the Zoom chat talked about how this was the impossibility, these theories being "beautiful, but not able to be implemented in the classroom". One teacher even commented that differentiation was a curse word! This was insane to me, given the dynamic of what I've seen in this classroom; and in classrooms that I've worked in since students returned after the pandemic.
I teach 2nd grade, after spending a lot of my professional career working in 1st. When I first walked into the classroom, one of the first things I noticed was my students were extremely lacking in phonetic ability. I would tell them to write in their notebooks, and many would only write a sentence. Just this would cause some to melt down completely. Some of my students would only be able to write 'sentences' that looked like strings of letters. My school uses DRA as an assessment tool, and at the beginning of the year, my students ranged from a Level A, to a level 18. From the moment of entering the room, I was plagued with the issue of how to reach all of these kids at where they were at, while still challenging my students at grade level. I began with running sight word assessments and using my DRA assessments to begin to put small groups together. Even with this though, I was struggling with routines that I could use for small group instruction. The most I had was decodable readers, that were not at the level that my lower kids needed. I also supplemented these tools with alphabetic recognition assessments. I expressed these concerns in a meeting with my mentor teacher, as I was worried about how it would affect my students testing, and overall, progress. If they didn't understand the basics, how were they going to understand 2nd grade level, whole group content? She suggested using the text: How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction as a skeleton for small group reading instruction. There's an assessment called the Informal Decoding Inventory, that identifies where students are at phonetically. I ran this assessment, as well as rerunning the Letter Names and Recognition assessment with some of my newer, struggling, students. I then, used this assessment data as well as the Words Their Way to put together new, targeted, reading groups. For each of these reading groups, students are given a "blend it book", with words that are specified to a phonetic skill (my class ranges from short vowels, digraphs, vowel teams, and irregular word endings). During centers this week, one of the centers is that students need to read their blend it book three times, circling the words that they aren't familiar with. Then, I call the students to my table 2-4 at a time, who are reading the same book. I have students use Elkonian boxes to sound out the words in the story they are unfamiliar with (highlighting the phonetic skill the book is supposed to be teaching). I also run small group sight word lessons, and with each word, would have students go back to the text, and underline that word in the text. This structure is a new one in my classroom, and so I'm excited to see how well it works out. So far, I've had a number of students that can completely read their blend it books, and can sound out all of the tricky words. I'm excited to see how my students progress with this new information!
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Lindsay BarnhartJust a teacher, trying her best to learn as much as she can about Education :) Archives
March 2022
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