The Megabook for Fluency

 Maria and I have shared our thoughts on the professional read Responsive Literacy: A Comprehensive Framework.  We have also had the opportunity to review The Megabook of Fluency by Timothy Rasinski and Melissa Smith.  And I will just go ahead and admit it...I was a little nervous about writing a post about fluency lessons/interventions.  In recent years, fluency has had a pretty bad rap because of assessments that just analyze rate.  That has forced fluency to take on a meaning of speed versus a multi-dimensional word.

But luckily, the authors address this misconception IMMEDIATELY.  Fluency is multi-dimensional and includes the following components:

• Expression which includes prosody, intonation, tone, stress
• Automatic word recognition which includes pace or rate
• Rhythm and Phrasing which includes pausing
• Smoothness which includes accuracy and ability to self correct

The authors acknowledge that fluency instruction has often taken the form of reading quickly, timings, and repeated readings with a target reading rate in mind.  Due to these routines, many children have seen fluency as a competition either with others or themselves.  Or due to these routines, teachers have dropped fluency instruction altogether.  Neither of these outcomes are good.

It is mentioned that expressive reading is hard to measure.  Everyone probably hears something a little different.  Due to this, it is often missing from our instruction of fluency.  This point really stuck out to me.  Just because we can't assess it (or it is difficult to), doesn't make it less important.

Rasinski and Smith recommend using "effective, engaging, and authentic [fluency instruction] methods  that build word recognition automaticity (not speed) and prosodic or expressive reading."  Due to this need, the rest of the book (literally 300 pages) is full of lessons to support effective fluency instruction.  There are lessonS for each of the following categories:

Begin Early: Fluency in Primary Grades

Expressive Fluency

Fluency Fun: poems, songs, chants

Social Fluency

Partner Texts

Famous Quotes

Environment

Family Involvement 

As I was reading, I really saw myself doing many of these lessons or even turning some of them into small group interventions to hone in on some of these skills for students.  I want to show you why I liked the set-up of these lessons:

First off...can I just say teaching fluency with wordless books!  Yes!!   I'll be honest.  I never thought of that.  But I can see it now because it ties right into language!

I love that the lesson highlights (on the left) exactly what fluency skill is being practiced.  I can see this being helpful to me when I am really looking for a lesson that will hit a specific need for a student. Sometimes they just need a "little something" to bring the point home.  I also liked that each lesson highlights the grade band that it would work best for.  It is a large band.  But it still provides me with an idea of when a student should be participating in that type of instruction.

Here is an example of another lesson  You can see that all the fluency skills are checked off for this lesson.  This lesson provides an example of something else I really liked about this book...the materials.  "Jump-Rope Chants" does provide a book idea for you to purchase but behind this lesson are jump rope chants that you can use right away with your students.
Thank you!

Overall, I was happy to see the authors of this book addressing the negative tones that have surrounded fluency.  It is an important skill but it entails so much more than speed and word counting.  And these lessons certainly hit upon all aspects of fluency instruction.

Check back for a giveaway! 

Note Taking Reflections

It is almost December!  How does the year fly by so quickly?  Today I found myself in a mess of papers.  It was all for good reason.  Or at least I hope so.

My OCD comes out in many ways...reflections is one of those ways.  I am probably too hard on myself in many cases, but this has also led to a lot of personal growth. 

Today was no exception.  Last year I wrote a post about my need for better note taking with my LLI prompting.  It looked something like this...

I still love the concept behind this because I was trying to look for overall patterns that would guide my instruction.  And it has.  But what I am missing is the big picture.  How are my students reading when compared to the literacy continuum?  Are they exhibiting the reading behaviors that are appropriate for them and how can I push them to grow?

So this led to a mess: the emptying of my binder, new dividers, more labels, and a continuum checklist.

 I believe this will help me as I continue to intervene with my young readers.  But if I had not reflected on how my note taking process was going, I would have continued on the path I was on.  And it was not a bad path.  But I am hoping for a more effective and responsive system.

This is what teaching is all about.  Learning right along side our little learners.

Em

Adding More Positive Too

Last month I shared some ways that I have been working to highlight positive actions that occur in my small groups.

 Through our school wide discussions about creating trauma sensitive classrooms, we decided that between intervention cycles, we needed to do some celebrating.

Let me back up just a bit...

After six weeks of intervention, my building wide interventions stop.  My RtI team reassesses each student in intervention to ensure that they are receiving exactly what they need.  This does mean that groups and interventions change.

What we realized is that we were not giving our students enough "closure" between the groups.  I personally felt like I needed to do a better job explaining why they were changing groups and celebrate the work they had done to improve!

Our first intervention cycle recently ended.  To celebrate, I asked each group member to tell me something positive that another student did or added to our group.  Then they wrote a note to that student with that positive thought on it.

It was a really nice way to transition groups.  Each student complimented someone else, but left with a compliment for themselves.

I am thankful that my teammates continues to push me to improve my teaching skills.  It is having a positive impact on me, as well as my students.

Em

Handwriting Intervention and Tools

This has proven to be a rather productive year when it comes to intervention.  We saw gaps in our RtI process and we worked hard to fill them.  Is it a perfect system?  No.  It never will be because we are working with changing, growing little humans.  But we are meeting their needs on a more individual basis better than any other year I can remember.  And that is progress, for sure.

Earlier this school year, I shared what we did to change our RtI process.  One important change that we made has to do more with our philosophy that resulted in action.  We really believe that one blanket intervention is not the answer.  And I will admit that before I knew better, this is exactly what I did.

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." -Maya Angelou

 

I had access to one program and that is what I used to intervene with all my Tier 2 students.  I truly believe that we need to analyze and determine what each student really NEEDS to move them forward.

So this is exactly what we did this year.  We assessed, analyzed, and determined what intervention would best meet the needs of each and every student in our K-2 building.  Some of them needed a handwriting intervention.

I have never provided handwriting interventions before.  Over and over again it has been mentioned that students are moving grade to grade and their writing is not legible.  So we decided to do something about it.  And what we found is that it was a very quick intervention.  For most students it took less than 5 minutes a day and lasted only a couple of weeks.

Once I analyzed some baseline data, I was able to determine the students that needed additional assistance on letter or number formation.  Then I made a list of the exact letters or numbers that were in need.

Handwriting Without Tears has a sequence that they feel is best when teaching upper case and lower case letters. By using this sequence, I was able to make connections between letters that are formed in a similar way. I used their sequence, plus the assessment data to determine the letters that I would focus on each day.  Here is an example:

Then I began working with each student. We would review previous letters learned.  Then I would show them how to form two new letters.  First they would trace the letter with sandpaper.  Then we would draw the letter in the air with our arm and on the table with our index finger.  These movements would transfer onto paper.  I would model the letter formation with a highlighter on lined paper.  The student would trace my letter and form their own letter next to mine.

The multi-sensory materials used were key.  Here are some other options to provide a multi-sensory experience. 

This is just salt in a small tin that I bought at Dollar General for 25 cents.  Students use the eraser end of a pencil to form the letter.

This is an old place mat that I cut up.  I drew lines on it so that we could use our finger to write the letters.  I have also placed paper on top to provide a bumpy surface when they write.

I like to use a variety of writing tools for motivation, engagement, and to provide different sensory experiences.  Kwik Stix just came out with these Thin Stix.  It feels very smooth when you write with them.  For my students, these really "force" them to write with continuous motion.  If you do not, a gap will form in the letters (see image below).  For this reason, I have found these to be really helpful when I work on handwriting.

I found great success with the intervention because it was multi-sensory, one on one, explicit, and direct.  I was worried that the new learning would not transfer over into class work and writer's workshop.  For the students that I worked with, I did analyze their writing pieces with them.  We looked over their letter formation together.  Then practiced any letters that they still were not comfortable writing.  This little added analysis really made a difference with the transfer of knowledge.

Any handwriting tips?  I'll take them!
Em

Analyzing Your RtI: Research Based Interventions

After realizing our RtI model wasn't really working for us or our students, the teachers in my building decided to analyze the different components of our RtI model.  This blog series will go in depth with how we scrutinized each of the following parts of the model:
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development

 In the previous post, I described our assessment flow charts that help us to "nail" down the skills that each student needs to begin working on.  For some it may be phonological awareness, while another group of students need an intervention for fluency, and others may need a more comprehensive program like LLI.

But then what?  And who does them?  And how do you fit them all in the schedule?

Well...this is also going to vary greatly from school to school because we all have different resources, different constraints, a varying amount of support, and unique populations of students.   But I want to share with you what we did in the hopes that it can help you along your journey.

First things first...we had to figure out what we even had available to us.  We were looking for interventions that were research based, could be completed with fidelity, had a script or at least a very clear sequence.  When we sat down and really looked at all of our resources, this is what we discovered:

This list will certainly grow and change as we grow with our RtI model.  But it was and is a place for us start.

Some of our interventions are actual programs that are sequential and include all that we need.  These include PALS, LLI, Orton Gillingham, and Do the Math. But there were some gaps that needed to be filled and the Florida Center for Reading Research and Intervention Central are great resources to help fill the gaps!

Florida Center for Reading Research has some great hands on activities that lend themselves well to being used as a phonological awareness intervention.  To fit our needs, I typed them up.  Here is one example:

All of these interventions were put into a binder with tabs to separate the different components of phonological awareness.  Then we put all the materials needed to do any of the interventions in a bin and labeled them by the intervention number.

Intervention Central has some research based interventions for fluency and sight words that we found worked well for our students.  So I printed them off and also placed them in a binder so that they could be easily accessible to anyone conducting that intervention. 

As we continue on our journey through RtI, we will continue to evaluate how our interventions are working for our students.  Some guiding questions for us include: Are there any gaps that we are not filling?  Are the interventions that we are using providing the support needed for each individual?  Are there interventions that are not proving to have solid and productive results?

LLI will be a new intervention piece for us this year and I am super excited to use it!

The next piece to our RtI model...progress monitoring.

Em

Analyzing Your RtI: Universal Screening

After realizing our RtI model wasn't really working for us or our students, the teachers in my building decided to analyze the different components of our RtI model.  This blog series will go in depth with how we scrutinized each of the following parts of the model:
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based  Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development

 

The RtI Action Network has a great definition of for universal screening.  Basically, they say that the purpose of these screenings (within the RtI model) is to determine the students that are in need of additional academic support.  The assessments are given to all students and help a school to identify their "at-risk" students.

Universal screeners vary per school district and maybe even per grade level within a school.  But they are typically the first step.  As we worked to analyze our RtI, we had to take a close look at our screeners and what they were telling us...or not telling us.

Currently, my K-2 building uses Aimweb as a universal screener.  This is a decision made at the district level. This assessment provides us with a quick one minute look at the following literacy components: 

• phoneme segmentation
• letter names
• letters sounds
• nonsense words
• fluency
• maze completion

We also decided that, as a building, we wanted to use the DRAs to provide us with a reading level, strategies, comprehension, and general knowledge about each student as a reader. 

What we found was that these universal screeners gave us a starting point but did not provide us with the information that we needed to actually start intervening with our Tier II students. For example: if a student showed that they were having difficulty with phoneme segmentation, it is not clear as to where to start on the phonological awareness stair step because Aimsweb only looks at this one component. We needed to dig a bit deeper.

 We created a flow chart for each grade K-2 for what we would do if a student fell below proficient on the universal screeners.  Here is an example of our first grade chart:

 Once the universal screeners are complete and the data is in, we can use the flow chart to determine exactly what diagnostic assessments we need to give to our Tier II and Tier III students.  Our hope is that we are getting to the root of their achievement gap.  It can be easy to fall into a "one size fits all" model that does not reach the true gap that keeps the student from reaching their full potential.

But then came the next challenge: ensuring that we had diagnostic screeners for each of these smaller components.  And we didn't.  So we went searching.

Phonological Awareness Diagnostic:

I love the phonological awareness assessment in this book.  It covers all the parts of the continuum:

• rhyming identification
• rhyming utilization
• alliteration identifcation
• alliteration utilization
• sentence segmentation
• syllabication
• onsets
• rimes
• blending task
• phoneme segmentation
• phoneme deletion
• phoneme substitution

This assessment provides me with a great starting point.  I know exactly where to start my interventions for phonological awareness.

Phonics Diagnostic:

Aimsweb gives me a good starting point.  It tells me if they can quickly tell me letter names or letter sounds in one minute.  But if they cannot do this, it does not tell me exactly what letters and sounds they do not know.  It also does not tell me if they can read digraphs, vowel teams, or words endings.  This is necessary information for me to have, if they need a phonics intervention.

The University of Texas has a Quick Phonics Screener (QPS) that they put out.  I like the way that it is set up because I can pinpoint what phonics skills a student has mastered and where to begin our interventions.  My teammate and I reworked it and typed it up to match our exact needs.  But here is a snapshot of what part of it looks like:

Fluency:

Aimsweb gives us a pretty good picture of whether a student has fluency or not.  It is a quick snapshot.  But if the phonological awareness and phonics prove to not be a problem, then we really do not need to give an additional fluency assessment.

Comprehension:

This one is a bit more involved because there are different components to comprehension.  It is important to pin point where the gap is for each particular student.  Is it retelling, literal questioning, inferential questioning, or evaluative questioning that the student is struggling with?  The DRA or a similar tool is helpful for determining this. We also found a quick assessment on Neuhaus website.  

Once the assessments are complete and the needs are determined, it is time to look at an appropriate intervention to match the need.

Em

Analyzing Our RtI: High Quality Instruction

After realizing our RtI model wasn't really working for us or our students, the teachers in my building decided to analyze the different components of our RtI model.  This blog series will go in depth with how we scrutinized each of the following parts of the model:
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development

This is where we needed to start when my building sat down to really talk about RtI.  Before we could look at interventions, RtI meetings, etc, we needed to determine if we were all on the same page with our Core classroom instruction.  And that is what we did.  We started with our reading instruction.

My district has a reading program that is followed.  But as we know, reading programs have a lot in them.  There is no way to hit everything that is in them.  So we pick what matches the needs, the standards, and what we all feel is best.  But this can also be tricky.

So we started with large chart paper.  I wrote each ELA standard on a separate piece of paper.  In vertical meetings (K-2), each teacher wrote down what they were doing to hit that particular standard or how it was hit in the basal program.

Then came the hard part...determining what we felt was best practice and backed by research.  We wanted to ensure that we were utilizing our time and resources to their fullest potential.  Please don't think this was an easy discussion.  It never is.  We all have activities that we like to do, but that doesn't always mean that they are the best utilization of our time.

By looking at each standard and the ways of teaching it, in this type of detail, we were able to outline a literacy framework.
 After looking at many different samples, we decided our framework would include:

•  an outline for each component of literacy that should be found in each classroom (here is one example):

•  Guidelines of best practices for each of those literacy components (here is one sample):

•  Description of what students and teachers are doing (another sample):

•  Resources for each component of the ELA block: books, websites, articles

• Glossary of terms

• Definition of teacher roles

• Common vocabulary to use as a building (this is to help students as they move from grade to grade)

• Common materials needed.  We included the sight word lists that we would use as a building and some common vocabulary assessments that could be used.

Through this process we made a few discoveries:

• As a building, we had a great foundation to start this framework.

• Many best practices were already in place.

• Teachers had a strong knowledge base about research based strategies

We also realized that we had some gaps:

• We needed to "tighten" our times spent on different literacy components in order to "free" up time for Tier II interventions.

•  We were not hitting vocabulary to the degree that we would have liked; therefore, we came up with a plan and a weekly assessment to integrate more vocabulary instruction.

• Common usage of terms needed to be address because it would be beneficial to our students.

Analyzing the Core instruction at your school is similar to any assessment that is given to our students.  There are strengths and weaknesses.  As I reflected with the RtI specialist, she expressed that each time she goes through this process with a school different results are produced.  Each school comes to the table with a different set of needs.  The framework that works for one school may not work for another.  But  the conversations between staff members, the honesty, the tears, the letting go, the holding on, the learning, the growing, and the changing all help to create one strong framework and school.

With the literacy framework complete, we can now focus on our next chapter: universal screenings and their impact to uncover our Tier II needs.

Em

Analyzing Your RtI: A Blog Series

2 years ago we started to really...like really...analyze our RtI process when a specialist came into my school to discuss research based interventions. She had so much to share: research based interventions, intervention menu boards, and background information on the RtI model.  Meeting after meeting my brain became more overloaded, frustrated, and (quite frankly) angry.

Que the rain cloud:

Why?  Her information was good.  It was accurate.  She was willing to help.  We needed it.

But I was so overwhelmed.

And what I realized was that we did not have our school set-up for this.  We did not have the structures in place to make RtI work for us.   But I did not understand this (at the time) and so my frustration grew.

And learning what I I didn't know (that I needed to know)...was my first step to understanding RtI.

Every school is so SO different.  What works for one may not work for another.  But that does not mean that we don't learn from each other.  We can take a some ideas from one school, some from another, a bit from yet another.  And that is what I started doing.  Reading, researching, and learning about how to make RtI work for us.

This summer I read an article titled: "Reviewing the Roots of Response to Intervention: Is There Enough Research to Support the Promise" by Tammi Ridgeway, Debra Price, Cynthia Simpson, and Chad Rose.  They outlined the components of RtI and those are: high quality instruction, research based instruction, common assessments, universal screening, continuous progress monitoring, fidelity, and professional development.

My building has gone through and analyzed these different components of our RtI model.  I am going to start a series of blog posts that will go through these parts of RtI and what we did to try to make a change.
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development
 My thinking may not match your school perfectly.  But my hope is that you can pull a little from here and some from other sources.

Em