Exciting News

I have some exciting news!
Next year I am moving districts and I am going to be an Instructional Coach for Math and Reading for Kindergarten Teachers. I am so excited to start this new chapter in my educational career.
Do you have Instructional Coaches at your school? If so, please share with me some of the wonderful things they have shared with you.
We will be using Scott Foresman Reading Street and Envision Math.

Teachers on Instagram

I love how teachers are connecting through Instagram!!!
Every Tuesday take a picture of something fun, creative or silly you are doing throughout your day and post it to Instagram using the #teachertalktuesday
Check it out today!!!

Rite Flight

I recently attended a video conference with a wonderful woman, Trish from the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital on their Dyslexia program called Rite Flight. Right Flight is a great classroom intervention for Fluency and Comprehension. I personally will be using the sight word part next year and will dive into the comprehension portion over the summer. It is very inexpensive and worth a look, click here Rite Flight

New Intervention/Program

In February, I went to 3 training classes for The SLANT System. It was an introductory course for their structured language system by Marsha Geller. I LOVED the course, it taught me so much about the English language and how to teach students how to read, write and spell. It is researched based, you can personalize it for any child, and it is multisensory. My friend uses this at her school for her tier 3 and Special Education program so I thought I would give it a try. After my brief introduction I also found it can work with those of you who are using Words Their Way.
At my school in RtI we are big on changing interventions after 3 weeks if the previous one isn't working. Well I agree to an extent, but we also need to try the intervention for a bit longer. Marsha said something along the lines of you can change an intervention/program as much as you want, but if your teachers aren't qualified, the student won't make progress. And that is so true in my district.
Please take a look at the SLANT System. It is a wonderful phonics, reading comprehension,and  multisensory program. http://slantsystem.com/

Our Website

Our school subscribes to TeacherWeb.com which I love!!! Teacher Web is a site teachers can subscribe to for a cost $ (click to find out because mine is paid by my school). It's where you can create your own classroom website. It is so simple. You don't need to have any prior knowledge of html or anything like that. It is very user friendly. They have cute graphics and can add your own if they don't have one you like.
I have spent a lot of time working on this site for our parents and for the teachers we work with.
Click here to view our Teacher Web page.
Communicating with parents is so important and is one of my goals.

Boggle

I can't take credit for this, I saw it first on Pinterest:)

I know it isn't an intervention, but my students love it. I started it right after our state testing

and will leave it up for a week at a time. Each week I take my real Boggle game, shake it up and then pin up the letters.

I did modify the rules a bit for my students, I just told them that the letters needed to touch, they could unscramble them, as long as they touched eachother.

In our second week one of my students found 56 words. I couldn't believe this was coming from the students who are considered the bottom 10th percentile of their grade level. It was so excited and better yet the students felt successful!

I highly recommend this for any classroom:)

Fountas & Pinnell

I was lucky to be able to attend Fountas & Pinnell's introduction to their NEW LLI Red (3rd grade) kit at the IRA conference in my home town of Chicago. It was a lavish open bar event held at the McCormick Place Convention Center. Unfortunately I can not attend the conference, but it was still exciting to see and hear the famous Fountas & Pinnell speak. They also raffled off 3 of their kits, but there were 950 people there so I knew my chances were slim. Look for the new intervention kit to come in October. I can't wait to see it and hopefully purchase it next year!