Shift: One Little Word

For the past few years I have strayed away from New Year's Resolutions and picked one word to focus on.  This has led to more personal growth than I ever saw with a resolution.

2019 was by no means a rough year; however, each age brings its own set of new challenges.  And 2019 was no different.  I now have an 11 year old and a 9 1/2 year old that have their own interests: volleyball, piano, baking, sewing...
And their own opinions about books, politics, movies, food...
And then there are the hormones...


With their older age has come later bedtimes.  I have found that this means less time for me to complete school work, blog, and create.  Mostly because I am exhausted by that time of the night. 

I try hard to meet the girls needs of playing with friends, indulging in creative ideas they have, providing opportunities for physical activity, weekly family dinners...
I try hard to meet my own needs of yoga, reading, water aerobics, time with friends...

But what I have found out in 2019 is that I am struggling with their shift in age.  My shift from blogging to not blogging.  Creating a lot to not creating much.  Shifting from a huge focus on my career to focusing on families interests.  The list could really go on. 

Basically, I am struggling with the shift in time.  The changes that time brings. I will be 40 this year.  And I want to focus on growing with these shifts in time instead of resisting these shifts in time.

So my word this year...shift.

Student Party Planning to Creatively Analyze Book Characters

For the past several years, Otis has been a well-loved name in our classroom.  If you have never met him, Otis is a kind-hearted, loving, red tractor that makes several new friends throughout the series.  I have written about this book throughout the years, as he has been used during theme and metacognition lessons within our classroom.  But this year proves to be just a little different.  Because this year...Otis turns 10!  And we are ready to celebrate.
 

Intervention for an Intervention

 I previously shared that I would like to reflect each week about a failure (because we learn and grow through them).  This week is no different!

The past two years I have used Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) and we (me and my students) love it.  The books are so engaging and the different characters are loved.  For the most part, my teammates and I have followed the program.  And we have seen some great growth in our Tier 2 reading instruction.

 In the training, we did learn that the phonics should meet the need of the group.  It seemed that each student in each group had a different set of needs.  So for the past two years, I have followed the phonics written with the LLI lesson.  But...yep, you guessed it.  Those gaps did not seem to fill.

This was a hard failing to swallow.  Because it was on me for not tailoring my instruction to better meet the need. It led me to some great reading.

From reading and conversations with Orton-Gillingham trained co-workers, I came up with a plan.
1. Assess reading level with F&P.
2. Assess phonological awareness skills.
3. Assess phonics skills.

Word Study and Phonics: The Next Step Forward

A Little Opinion from Em:
Well Jan Richardson did it again (along with Michele Dufresne, this time)!  Jan's guided reading books really helped me  to tighten and strengthen my small group instruction.  And her new book "The Next Step Forward in Word Study and Phonics" is already helping me to plan for my phonics instruction this year!

One section addresses children reading at a pre-A stage.  Yes, please!!  I jumped right to this and got started.  To begin with, students need to be able to recognize their name.  This is where I started with a couple of my readers.  Two different colored sentence strips were used.  One had the child's name printed on it.  The second strip had the child's name printed on it but then I cut out each letter.  My student worked to match the letters in her name by placing the cut up letters on top of the first sentence strip.
Once this task could be completed without prompting, I provided letter tiles and asked her to build the name.  For many of the sessions, the original sentence strip  was used to help with the building process.  But after time, she could build the name independently.

A Little Opinion from Maria:
This book is jam packed with ideas and lessons for readers at all levels.  I liked how this book is set up.  It's easy to read and if I ever (hopefully never, though) had to teach reading again, this book would be right by my side, every step of the way.