mClass Growth is ASTOUNDING!

I know it's been a while. BUT I had to share this.

Our class growth last year was ASTOUNDING!

Every student in our class made growth. Like, positive growth. Like, huge, positive growth!

To what do I attribute this growth? A few resources I created and inserted into our daily/weekly routine.

Our district uses the Wonders Curriculum. Our classroom uses the decodable readers and decodable passages that are included in the weekly Wonders reading/phonics plan.

Our school population is such that not all of our students have books at home to read, so I have our decodable readers in students' hands every day. Most of the Wonders units have two stories a week, so we spend a couple of days on each story. (We all know rereading makes our kids more confident, fluent readers.) My students aren’t allowed to write in their decodable readers, but they need practice reading and finding words with the weekly phonic sound pattern. We began using these pages every day after reading the story in our readers and WOW, decoding skills improved! Blending skills improved! AND test scores improved!

Our class routine is: we read the story in our decodable readers whole group then while the story slide is on our Promethean board, students circle and/or underline the sound pattern on the printed copy of the story. Working on soft c and soft g this week? Then circle all of the soft c and soft g sounds you find in words in the story. Students love seeing if they can find ALL of the words with the weekly sound. Early finishers can come up and circle the letters in the words on the board. This rereading and decoding routine truly helped grow my students.

We did the above in whole group. We also worked on phonics, reading, and comprehension in our literacy centers. At center 3, students would work on the weekly phonics skill. Students would color the sound pattern and the words that have that sound pattern the same color and they also had fill in the blanks and multiple choice questions to choose the word with the correct sound pattern. The work is differentiated to accommodate differences and individualize learning. The pages were a great way for students to have repeated exposure and practice to phonics patterns. The students enjoyed the phonics-skills sorting, and I enjoyed the quiet work this activity provided.

While the above was happening in Center 3, over in Center 1, students were with me rereading our Wonders weekly decodable reader stories and decodable passages - working on weekly phonics skills and comprehension and text evidence skills. Students had to identify and pull out information in the passage to support their answers. Students loved highlighting their evidence in the passages!

Talking about building reading fluency, comprehension AND critical-thinking skills! It was a great way to incorporate text evidence skills into our daily routine!

This rereading and decoding and comprehension routine truly helped grow my students.

Check it out in your classroom!