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!

Read Naturally

My first fluency intervention of the year is always Read Naturally. RN is a differentiated instructional program where the student work on repeated readings and teacher modeling to help to improve their fluency, comprehension and some phonics skills.
I personally like the non-fiction stories the RN offers because it provides a good opportunity for a quick mini-lesson. A 4th grade student just came in today and said they were starting a new story in their Reading Street (core curriculum) on Amelia Earhart and he remembers reading about her in RN, 2.0. So I feel it provides the students with good background knowledge.

More Assessments...

Currently at my school we are assessing all our student using the STS (Scholastic Testing Services) Illinois Learning Standards Battery. It is not state mandated so I don't know why we take it along with the ISAT test. I personally think the test is poorly written and we receive good scores so that is why we still use it. But anyways...our RtI program is put on hold so I haven't seen my kidos since last Friday:(
I am not sure how other schools figure out who is in the tiers, but at our school (grades 2-8) we take the MAP/NWEA test 2x's/year, AIMSWeb R-CBM 3x's/year and STAR 3x's per year to see who falls under the 25th percentile (Tier 2) or the 10th percentile (Tier 3). We then triangulate the data to see where the student falls. I feel it is a highly effective way to find each student's placement.
This year I started out with 22, 3rd and 4th graders and currently I only see 13 because our tiers are fluid. Once the student meets their goal 3 out of 5 times they move out of that tier. Unfortunately, I did have to send 5 students into special education because they weren't  making adequate progress, but on the plus side I did have 6 student meet both their goals in fluency and comprehension. I also was sent 2 students who weren't making progress in tier 2, but that was just a few weeks ago.
Our reading students are progress monitored every week in both AIMSWeb R-CBM (Fluency) and on STAR for comprehension. Our math students are also progress monitored once a week for computation and concepts using both AIMS and STAR.
Below is the form we use to document the students progress monitoring and interventions. We also send home the computerized graphs every month to the parents so they are kept in the loop. I find it very helpful to use this form on a weekly basis to see if I should change the intervention.

Welcome!

I am so excited to start blogging! I happened to stumble upon the wonderful world of teaching blogs with my recent addiction to Pinterest. Over winter break I was introduced to it and I can't seem to stop searching for wonderful, new teaching ideas. 
I am hoping to share with you some of the ways my district does RtI and also include some of the interventions I am working on here with the 3rd and 4th graders. Like I said in my profile I am a Reading Specialist so most of my interventions will be with reading but I will also add things our math teachers are working on along with common core stuff and I am sure much, much more.
I can't wait to start sharing!