A Little Writing Intervention–Day 1

I want to share with you one of our RTI Interventions today.  Although we LOVE to write in our classroom, and we write every.single.day, there are still some sweet babies that struggle with composing and transcribing their thoughts. 

We’ve started using a writing intervention from Linda Dorn and have had some great results. 

Here is in a nutshell….

My set-up looks like this.  You could use an easel and chart paper too, but I don’t have space around my reading table for an easel, so I just staple paper to my bulletin board.

Step 1:

Shared Reading of a poem or nursery rhyme.  You should choose a poem that contains a target sight word that your group needs to learn.  *Be sure to take data before you start – sight word check and sentence dictation to get a baseline of where your kiddos are at.

After you read the poem (the goal is not for them to read it, but to hear the language and how you read it), do some quick phonemic awareness activities and comprehension questions.

*What happened in the poem? What was it about?

*Then, read part of the poem and tell the children to listen for a word that starts like ___ on our abc chart (you’ll need these for your kiddos too)

*Say ____ and ____ (say the two words)

*What letter sounds that same?

*Where is it at? (on the alphabet chart)

Step 2: 

Ask the children if they can think of any other words that start like those 2 words.  As they name off words, write them on the top of your chart paper. (Ignore the bottom paper for now – that is part of day 2).  Next, read all of the words together, and ask “What part is the same in all of these words?”

Step 3: 

Read through the alphabet chart together.  (Sorry, I forgot to snag a picture of them doing this).  This is very quick – the kids get really good at it after a while.  So you would say, a /a/, apple, b /b/ ball…etc.

Step 4:

You will have prepared bowls of magnetic letters using the letters of your focus sight word.

Have the children line the letters up across the top of a white board. They will pull down each letter quickly practicing the left to right motion and saying the name of the letter.

Then, starting on the left again, they will push up and say the letter names again.

Next, tell the children to take ____ letters (how ever many letters are in the target word) and build a word they know – build ______. When the build the word tell them to take a good look at it, slow check it, and read it again.

Then mix the letters up and do it again.

Next, have them put their letters away, and practice writing the word on their dry erase board.

Then, put away the markers and dry erase boards. (leave the abc chart).

Step 5:

Next, you’ll have the children add the focus word to their dictionaries. 

Ask:

*What page are we adding it on? Why?

*Find the letter on the alphabet chart. Is the “_” page going to be at the beginning, middle, or end of your dictionary?

Write the word in the dictionary with a marker

All of these steps is day 1 of our writing intervention process.  I’ll write another blog post to tell you what we do in day 2.  Once children get the hang of the routine of this, it will only take about 20 minutes each day. 

If you want to read more about it, check out this book:

Linda Dorn sure knows her stuff :)

I know it’s a little late, but I did just finish my March Word Work pack.  I designed this pack with ease of prep in mind – there are color and black and white versions.  I have a January pack, but never finished February (wah wah).  I’ll be working on April’s this week. 

The March pack is on sale right now, so grab it and file it away for next year (or squeeze in some activities this week!)

There are 12 different activities included in the pack (the previews only show a sampling…)

Here is what’s included:

*I Can Cards
*Common Core Correlations
*Color and Black and white pages
*Recording sheets for every activity
1. Pot O'Sight Words - sorting words by the number of letters
2.Shamrock sounds - identifying medial vowels and writing CVC words
3.All Sorts of Gold - E and I vowel sort
4. Silly Sounds - identifying ending sounds and writing CVC words
5. CVC Puzzles -building and writing CVC words
6. Leprechaun ABC's - reading sight words and putting them in ABC order
7. Shamrock Syllables - counting syllables
8. Shamrock Scramble - sentence reconstruction
9. Read, Clip and Write - identifying real and nonsense words
10.Loopy Leprechaun Word Sort - sorting and reading real and nonsense words
11. Star Bellied Sort - s, t, st sort
12. Lucky Digraphs - wh, th sort

Stay tuned for Day 2 of writing intervention!

Have a great weekend!