Divide and Conquer...Reading Intervention!

My school has a large population of struggling readers. It's a Title 1 school, and everyone gets free lunch. The reading specialists are fantastic and pull kids as often as they can, but there are simply just too many struggling readers and not enough teachers to get them the small group help they need. This post is all about working with your team to get your students reading!

This year my team and I decided to try something new. Well, this idea certainly isn't new, but grouping the students this way and working together was for us. During reading intervention time, we decided to level the remaining kids and divide and conquer reading intervention. There are four teachers and roughly 80 kids left in our rooms during intervention time. We have four groups - on/above level, approaching level (strategic), below level (intensive), and way below level (intensive). As we call them, 2 high groups and 2 low groups. 

The low groups have fewer kids so we can focus on more intensive instruction and more individual attention. The way below level group has 12 students, and the below level group has 15. The 2 higher groups have about 27 students each. Each group has a different focus depending on what the kids need. The lowest group focuses mostly on phonics and decoding strategies; 2nd lowest group phonics and fluency. The higher groups focus on fluency, comprehension, and writing. 

To figure out which students go where, we ranked the students by their DIBELS scores. At the beginning of the year we started at the bottom and went up; second semester we started at the top and went down. If at the "break" there were multiple kids with the same score we put them in the same group. So far it's worked out pretty well - many students in the lowest groups doubled their scores and students in the higher groups showed a lot of improvement, too!

I'll be back in a few days with a post about what I do with my reading groups. Stop back to see what I do to get my kiddos reading!

Test Your Friends

I get sick of hearing my own voice sometimes. I talk all day while teaching, and I do try to get the kiddos talking more with partners and in group discussions, but they still need teacher support and guidance for the most part. We work so hard all the time, it's time for the students to work just as hard, if not harder, than we do!

Well, I was at a training about a year ago where I learned that whoever is asking the most questions is doing the most learning. Guess who asks the most questions in school? The teacher! 

As soon as I heard that I knew I needed to change. I needed to do better. Why not teach the students how to ask really good comprehension questions while reading? 

I do this with all of my students - it just varies by the group. I do this verbally with my struggling readers for most of the year, and boy do they sure love asking questions and choosing someone to answer - just like the teacher! My higher students practice with me a few times and then they are off to complete this on their own. They pick up the routines quickly and then they can usually run this on their own, most of the time anyway. Usually I have them read the book on their own first and write the questions, and then they can choose a partner to partner read the book with and ask the questions they already wrote as they go along. That way they already have the questions written so they are prepared and they know the answer that they need to find. Hopefully, they won't goof around when they are prepared with questions and answers ahead of time!

This is good for any grade level and any text. I have it on sale for 20% off in my TpT store until the end of the week! Click the image to go check it out!

Red Herrings

Don't you love those students who can finish problems or tasks before the rest of the class has written their name on their paper? You either love them or they drive you crazy and sometimes it is both at the same time. Instead of giving them a ton of extra work, which makes more work for you, why not get them thinking critically? 

Enter.. Red Herrings.

Wait. What?

A "red herring" presents four different problems and asks the students to figure out which one doesn't belong and why. In the picture above, the students had to figure out that 70+10=80 doesn't belong because the numbers in the ones column don't add up to 10. In all of the other problems, the numbers in the ones column add up to 10. But first, most of the students thought the problem that didn't belong with the others was 85 + 15 = 100 because it was a three digit number.


The great thing about red herrings is that students may figure out other "rules" or reasons why some other problems don't belong before they come to the correct reason. They may or may not be right, but either way it is great to get them thinking critically!


Red Herrings could be used in any subject, too!


Word work:


handwriting           handkerchief        photograph          cupcakes

Which one doesn't belong and why?


P.s. it's handkerchief because it is the only word that isn't a compound word.




Language Arts:

1. The children ran to the park on Saturday morning.
2. The mice are in the cage.
3. The tooth fairy found three teeth under the pillow.
4. The cats were scared of the dog and ran under the bed.


Which one doesn't belong and why?

P.s. it's sentence four because it is the only sentence without an irregular plural noun



Social Studies (Native American Tribes):

Sioux          Hopi         Apache          Navajo


Which one doesn't belong and why?

P.s. it's Sioux, because it is the only Native American Tribe that isn't found in Arizona.



Science (Animal Classifications):

Octopus          Gila Monster          Round Worms          Butterflies


Which one doesn't belong and why?


p.s. it's the Gila Monster because it is the only animal that is a vertebrate.



The possibilities are endless! It works for any grade, and any subject. How can you use red herrings in your classroom?

January Mixed Up Sentences

I think mixed up sentences are a great activity for younger students. Well, all students really. They need to figure out what order the words make sense, and which words go at the beginning or end of the sentence. You can even take it a step further by having the students put the sentences in the right order to form a paragraph. 

This product contains 6 sentences about January themes such as Martin Luther King, Jr. day, the 100th day of school, etc. AND it is on sale for 20% off until the end of the week! Click the image to pick this up in my TpT store.

Ideas for Teaching Word Problems

Today I'm linking up with  K's Classroom Kreations and Theresa's Teaching Tidbits  for Math Tip Monday. This post is all about teaching word problems! 

The math curriculum we use at school has a huge emphasis on teaching word problems. Needless to say, my students get a ton of practice with making sense of word problems!

The key to teaching word problems is to get the students to really consider what the problem is saying and asking you to do. I've found that best way to do this is annotating the problem. We already do this in reading all the time so why not do it in math, too?

This could be glued into an interactive notebook as a resource. The chart in my classroom looks just like this, except not as cute. Click the picture to download this FREEBIE in my TpT store!

We go through each of these steps every time we solve word problems. It is a systematic way to get students to consider the problem, and figure out the best strategy to solve it. The best part - it can be used for any grade or operation! 

Check out some of the other ideas for teaching those dreaded word problems:

An InLinkz Link-up

Looking Back at 2015

Wow. I can't believe it is the end of 2015 already! This sure has been a great year.. I got a new car, started a blog, and launched my TpT store... all things that I wanted to do for a while. I can't wait to see where life takes me in 2016!

I don't really do new year resolutions. But here is my "to do" list for 2016:

1. Blog more. I think I'm starting to figure this whole blogging thing out so you should definitely expect to see more posts from me in 2016!

2. Design more TpT products. Just like the blog, I think I'm starting to figure this out. And I'm having a fun time designing my products! 

Side note about that.. While I was student teaching I had a student notice that I gave different worksheets (differentiation) so students could show their knowledge in different ways. I made a joke that I made worksheets for fun, and at the time I was kidding, but it seems like that's kinda true now. 

Anyways.. back to my list!

3. Keep the house clean. Over winter break, I've FINALLY cleaned the place and it was so bad before I was too embarrassed to take before and after pictures so now it's time to really start decorating it. 

That's about it! Well, of course the whole spending time with friends and family, travel, eat healthy, read, but that's old news. 

Stay safe out there tonight & cheers to a great year!

Learning Contracts

Gifted students. Early finishers. We all have those students who sometimes need that extra push, another challenge that they can conquer. The question is – how do we challenge those students with

meaningful work, without having the teacher do a ton of extra work?

I use "Learning Contracts" with my students to challenge my gifted students, and also any high achieving students who can handle an enrichment project. These contracts are a simple solution to keep the high achieving students engaged and challenged, AND they can be used for any grade, any subject, or any standard. It takes the current objective to the next level for the students who have already mastered or have some level of proficiency with the topics you're teaching in class. 

You choose the learning objective, and how the students will show what they have learned. I usually include a few activities, but this could also be one larger project. There are "checkpoints" where you meet with the students and review the work they have completed so far. This keeps you updated on where your students are as they complete the project, and if you see a student is very behind then it will let the students who are behind know that they need to use their time more wisely. This is probably the most important part of the project because the students need timely feedback so they can complete the project correctly and finish by the due date. 

This year I have used learning contracts a lot with phonics. In the past I have used contracts in math, science, social studies, and reading. I have a lot of strong readers in my class this year who don't need as much of the "word work" when learning new phonics patterns, and get bored easily when working through centers. Instead of having these students write words various ways, they have done tasks such as reading through the decodable to highlight the words with the pattern, rewriting them, and sorting into categories when applicable. Many of my other reading groups complete this, but this is done at the end of the unit after teacher directed instruction. The students who complete the contract do this independently without the targeted phonics instruction in small groups. Now I am having my students write their own decodable with words with the phonics. 

This is not intended to be a whole class project. It is designed to challenge the few students in your class who constantly finish early and need an additional challenge. There is no way you could manage 30 learning contracts and keep your sanity at the same time!

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