Awesome Website

I wanted to share a website that a colleague shared with me. It is not related to RtI directly but has great ideas for all different types of classroom management issues. I LOVE IT! I have having kind of a rough year and their are wonderful ideas on it. The site is http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/. I read the book Dream Class by Michael Linsin, the creator of this website. It was a great book!

Kindergarten Update

Our kindergarten intervention groups have been making a lot of progress. The progress monitoring we have been doing is showing great gains in letter identification. Beginning with 24 students who recognized less than 15 letters, we now only have two students in this grouping, one of them being an ESL student from Saudi Arabia that just moved to our school two weeks ago and speaks ZERO English.

We have changed our groups to the following:

Most Intensive Group: 24 students

*4 classroom teachers working with 4-5 students each on identifying all 26 letters and sounds
*1 classroom aide working with 2 struggling students on a few letters at a time..DRILL!
*1 classroom aide working on rhyming with 6 students

Next Group - Still Intensive
*New Reading Interventionist working with 6 students using McGraw-Hill Triumphs reading program.

Next Group - Pretty Intensive Still (though getting soooo much better)
*1 Title 1 Teacher and 1 aide working with 10 students on beginning, middle and ending sounds.

Next Group - Strategic
*1 Title 1 teacher and 2 aides working with 16 students on sounding out cvc words.

Next Group - Enrichment
*1 Title 1 teacher and 1 aide working with 18 students blending words and beginning sentence writing.

Next Group - Enrichment
*1 Title 1 teacher and 1 aide working with 27 (too many) students on writing skills.

Interventionist Update

Things are going really great with our new Reading Interventionist!  She has been working with our students for about two weeks now and is doing a wonderful job.  She is working with some of the students who are currently in our Reading Recovery program, but may not discontinue when the program is complete.  We are hoping that she will give them a little bit more practice and possibly some new skills to use in order to make it over the hump to discontinue.  She is also working with some students after school each night on reading and math skills.  The students seem to enjoy this small group time with her and are already showing some improvement in their skills.

International Reading Association

This sight has lots of wonderful information for teachers.  It is a great resource for professional development opportunities as well as grant opportunities.  Teachers can find lesson plans and information on RtI.  We have found some great reading lists here, too!

Reading Rockets Website

Reading Rockets is a great website for anyone wanting to help students become better readers and thinkers.  It contains a lot of information for parents, teachers, principals, and even librarians.   A list of books and authors allows you to find new and interesting books to keep students interested in reading.  You can also find a section that focuses on struggling readers.  Check out this website if you haven't already and see what great information is available to you!

Reading Interventionist Joins Our Groups

We received exciting news about a week ago that we would be getting some more help during our intervention times!  Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!  We have had a Reading Interventionist for the last four years, but were told that we did not receive the grant this year that funds this position.  Something has obviously changed since we now have the funds to have an interventionist this year who will be working with grades K-2.  Our intervention teacher began working with students last week.  She works with the primary grades during their intervention time and also works with 1st grade students after school for tutoring.  She is able to work with one literacy group of 8 1st grade students after school on Mondays and Wednesdays & another literacy group after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  She also works with one math group of 8 1st grade students after school on Fridays.  These groups have been going for a week and the students attending seem to enjoy this.  We are very excited to have these opportunities for our students to work on the skills they struggle with in a small more focused group. 

Random Venting

I just wanted to post a paragraph from a book we are reading for our class - The RtI Edition of our No Quick Fix book...
    "It costs more to educate some children than others. Leven (1989) sugggests that, generally, we can expect to spend about 50 percent more to educate the at-risk child. Obviously, the costs vary from child to child depending on the nature of the child's difficulties and the intensity and duration of the needed intervention."

Why then, Mr. Governor and Mr. Superintendent, is our funding being cut when we don't make AYP? Obviously we don't need less money...we need more.

1st Grade Group Updates

Well, we are two weeks into our second set of intervention groups.  The groups changed slightly; which was expected.  We were given another aide to help with the highest group of students who work in the computer lab and in literature circles.  We have also been told that we may possibly have yet another aide to assist us, which would be great!  Most of the groups are working on the same type of skills, but at a little more difficult of a level.  The activities used have changed some, too.  Some of the groups are using rhyming and fluency passages, retelling using 4-square organizers, on-level text reading, answering questions based on the text reading, and looking all the way through words when reading.  The assessments given are comprehension, word fluency and dictation sentences.  Things seem to be going well and the students really are enjoying intervention time.  There are some rough patches, but this is expected since this is our first year having an intervention time.  We are learning what works and what doesn't and trying hard to get everything done in the short amount of time we have each week to prepare. 

A Word From the RtI Guy...

Here are a few words from Pat Quinn, "The RtI Guy".... speaking of his book Ultimate RtI.

Greetings Fellow Educators…

Like many of you I quickly became frustrated with the lack of concrete strategies and techniques available for teachers who are trying to implement Response to Intervention in their classrooms. One weekend I read three books about RTI and I STILL didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I don’t think we need more theory – I think we need real answers to tough questions about time, resources and most importantly: where do I find good interventions?

This book is written for real teachers in real classrooms. You know, the classroom with 35 kids of varying abilities. The classroom where you are expected to do it all – there is not help on the way. How does RTI look in that classroom? I will not only answer that question, but dozens of others I get every week from my newsletter readers. Questions about time management, handling paperwork, using RTI for eligibility purposes and many, many more.


-Pat Quinn
“The RTI Guy”

Check out his website at http://thertisite.com/ 

Assessment Week/New Group Placement

Monday through Wednesday of this week focused on a 3-Minute Reading Assessment for all 1st Graders.  Each teacher used the Intervention Block and part of their Reading Block to assess students on fluency and comprehension skills.  Title 1 teachers covered the classrooms so the teachers could pull students one at time to assess them without distractions.  Once these assessments were completed, the teachers met to group students according to their fluency percentage, fluency automaticity, and teacher observation.  This was definitely not an easy task!  We worked for 3 hours on student placement as well as making intervention lesson plans for all groups.  I will post what each group is working on soon! 

Intervention Break Week

This week all of our intervetion/enrichment groups are taking a break. The Title 1 teachers had meetings at different times and Halloween parties are going to get in the way - plus several grades wanted to regroup.I thought I would take a few minutes to explain how kindergarten groups are set up...for anyone who doesn't already know.
  
   Most Intensive Group
*4 classroom teachers in one classroom with approximately 6 students each focusing on 5 -10 letters.
     Letter assessment is done each Friday.

*1 assistant in this classroom working with the many students who are still unable to write their names.
   Name writing assessment each Friday.

  Next Group - Pretty Intensive Still
*1 Title One teacher and 1 assistant working with 14 students in small group on letter identification.
   Letter assessment is done each Friday.

  Next Group - Intensive....still
*1 Title One teacher and 2 assistants working with 16 students in small groups on letter identification.
  Letter assessment is done each Friday.

  Strategic Group
*1 Title One teacher and 1 assistant works with 24 students on Intensive Phonics in small groups.
  Different assessments done each Friday.

 Enrichment Group
*1 Title One teacher and 1 assistant works with 24 students on segmenting and blending words in small    groups. Different assessments done each Friday. 

1st Grade Review Week

This week, we are reviewing each of the skills and activities focused on during the last 4 weeks.  The phonics skill focus has been on the short a, short i, short o, and short u sound in the middle of words.  We have also worked on, in one or more of the intervention/enrichment groups, Sequential Phonics, sound boxes, recognizing capital & lower case letters, story comprehension, word fluency, fluency passages and locating & highlighting focus words in a passage.  At the end of each week, a dictation passage has been given to the students in the lowest intervention groups to see if the students can write all of the sounds they hear in the dictation.  The next lowest intervention groups are given a multiple choice progress monitoring on phonics skills and text structure.  The enrichment groups are given word recognition, fluency, and comprehension progress monitoring,  Next week, we will be giving a 3-Minute Assessment to each 1st Grade student to check for fluency, comprehension, word recognition and phonics.

Kindergarten Update

We ended our first round of intervention groups this week. We met several times to analyze all of the data we have collected from our progress monitoring over the past several weeks. As it turns out, we have many students misplaced in our groups. Our initial assessments used to determine grouping didn't hold true in many situations. It's very difficult to determine in the beginning weeks of school, which students are really "at risk" and which students just haven't had exposure to anything academic. Wow! We sure found out quickly. Many students who began the year recognizing zero letters now have all 26 capital and 26 lowercase mastered. I am really excited about most aspects of interventions. I really wish we didn't have to depend on other staff members to make this successful - just for the fact that groups get cancelled because of meetings and/or absences out of our control. End report...so far, so good!

Kdg. & 1st Grade Intervention Calendar

Intervention/Enrichment Update

 Well, we are entering into week 4 for First Grade and week 5 for Kindergarten.  Things are going o.k.  There have been some good things going on for both groups; however, there are also some minor bumps that need to be worked out.  This first 5 weeks of interventions have really been a trial and error type of thing.  The intervention block is definitely going to be a positive thing for our students once we gets things figured out (which will probably take most, if not all, of this school year).  The students seem to really like this time during each day.  Not only are they working in smaller groups, but they may be working with a different teacher and different students than they are use to.  This really keeps things interesting and fresh!

Intervention/Enrichment Block

Hi everyone. It's Erin, a Kindergarten teacher from Indiana and Michelle, a 1st Grade teacher from Indiana.  Our school was one of four schools in our district selected to pilot an intervention/enrichment block using RtI.  This is our first year doing so; therefore, it is all new to us.  Most of the staff has had some form of RtI training at some point before school began.  Which equals out to mean that we are all "learning as we go".  Since this is a new concept for our school, we decided to create this blog as a place for our grade levels to collaborate ideas on intervention strategies and lessons and communicate about positive and negative things going on in our intervention/enrichment groups.  We decided to focus on just Kindergarten and 1st Grade to begin with since these are the grades that we teach and because it is these two grades that our corporation decided to focus on during the pilot year.  Hopefully, this blog with provide a centralized communication place for our staff to work together to make the intervention/enrichment block time a success for our school!