Fluency Intervention and a Freebie!

We started our RTI groups today. Our grade level teams have all tried various ways to do these interventions. Some worked well, some did not. We are trying something new that I think will be a great solution to our RTI challenges!

Last year when I taught first grade our students traveled to another classroom and we called it Walk to Read. In those classrooms we worked on comprehension, fluency, word work and vocabulary. Additional parent helpers and paraeducators helped out by taking small groups. The students had a great time moving about but this was so much commotion to help the few that fell below benchmark and very draining on the teachers planning for whole group activities and stations.

This year, we analyzed our assessment data and identified those students in need of targeted interventions. 12 are part of a group to improve word attack and phonics. 12 are working strictly on fluency. I have a group of six that I see 4 days a week during our silent reading and AR testing time, so this is in addition to the regular reading instruction received in our language arts block.

We are using DIBELS Next for progress monitoring. I found these free printable fluency passages that look very similar to the assessments. http://treasures.macmillanmh.com/california/teachers/building-reading-and-writing-skills/student-fluency-passages

This is my tentative plan:

Monday~ Mini-lesson on fluency, then we look for tricky words in the passage and underline, highlight, frame, circle with wax sticks... Today we used rainbow colored pencils.

Then we read the passage slowly, reading for meaning and using our "storyteller voices". The students tracked with these fun glitter wands I picked up at a souvenir shop at the Mackinac Bridge! They loved it!

These students regularly loose their place and insert or omit words, so the sticks are a good way to help keep their eyes from jumping around! I've got some other pointers ready to keep the kids motivated!

Tuesday is timing day. We will work on increasing our rate or words per minute with a timed read.

Wednesday, we will get out the whisper phones and listen to ourselves.

Thursday will be buddy read or read to a stuffed animal day.

I will move away from these passages later in the year and work on fluency with poems, stories from the leveled library and readers theater! That's my plan.

I really like this small group model so far and I feel like I am getting to know my learners much better than I did when I had a classroom full of students that were not in my class.

I'd love to get some more ideas for my fluency group, so please share if you have a great mini-lesson or activity I can add to my bag of tricks!

On another note, we wrote silly animal sentences today and tomorrow the students are to take their favorite sentence and develop it into a writing piece. The activity was based on the book by Laura Numeroff, Dogs Don't Wear Sneakers

This piece will become a class book to share at conferences. I made this simple, but fun primary writing paper for our class book pages, journals and stories. It's a freebie at my TPT store. Click on the picture to download!

Hope it comes in handy!