This past week was a week for evaluating our reading groups and our current assignment helped to make this job a little easier. My first grade team and I took the DIBELS scores, guided reading levels and sight word levels of our students and placed them into groups based on their scores. We focused on placing our students that came out strategic and intensive into reading groups to address their specific needs with the best intervention tool. To make these decisions we consulted with Mrs. Neslin and she met with our grade level to determine what was the best tool to use with each group.
After placing the students into groups and determining the best intervention to use we knew that we had to address the students needs in their reading centers during the guided reading time. We knew that our centers could use some beefing up. I shared the information that I received in class about the Florida Center for Reading Research and as a grade level we visited the site to explore what was there. I was amazed at the resources on this site. There was a wealth of activities to help us meet the needs of our students. It was obvious to us that we could use these activities to help to improve our existing centers. There were activities to address all our students needs. There were a lot of hands on activities, games and make and takes. The activities addressed phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. As a grade level we decided to implement several of these activities to meet the needs of our more intensive students particularly in the area of letter - sound correspondence. We have implemented a plan to make many of the activities pulling from our wealth of parent volunteers to help make some of the activities at the TRC. We were extremely happy to find this valuable resource. There was no need to hunt for activities this sight had all kinds of resources for all our students and it's free for the taking.
