Since moving to a small district there are fewer questions from teachers when they are working with students who are learning English as a second language. Though it is a beginning, have students in a group or a classroom talking is important--it builds social language skills first but it also helps build academic language. (Academic language takes students longer to wrap their heads around.) I find these ideas a step. One that is important for all students.

Oral Language Acquisition and Learning to Read and Write?

How powerful is this relationship?

Implications

• A low-anxiety environment: This includes a setting where students feel nurtured and supported by their teacher and peers, and in turn, they feel safe to take risks without the fear of being laughed at or made fun of.
• Repeated practice: This is just like what it sounds! Students need repeated practice hearing and using a new language. They need multiple opportunities to comprehend and express their ideas in a new language. Like with anything new that we learn, practice helps us get better.
• Comprehensible input: This means finding different ways to make what is being said comprehensible and easier to understand. Things to consider with comprehensible input might include using speech that is appropriate for students' language proficiency, providing a clear, step-by-step explanation of tasks, and using a variety of techniques to support their understanding.
• Drama: This is a sense of excitement and engagement, can be found in activities like Reader's Theater, dramatic play, puppetry, narrating wordless picture books, etc. All of these activities also have the other three factors embedded within them. These activities assist in the development of oral language in addition to introducing students to oral reading and rich literacy experiences and responses in a classroom setting.

Connections to ESL Students

Stage	The Student	The Teacher
Preproduction	Minimal comprehension. Does not verbalize. Nods "Yes" and "No." Draws and points.	Show me … Circle the … Where is …? Who has …?
Early Production	Limited comprehension One/two-word responses. Uses key words/familiar phrases. Uses present-tense verbs.	Yes/no questions Either/or questions Who …? What …? How many …?
Speech Emergence	Has good comprehension. Can produce simple sentences. Grammar/pronunciation errors. Misunderstands jokes	Why …? How …? Explain
Intermediate Fluency	Has excellent comprehension. Makes few grammatical errors.	What would happen if …? Why do you think …? Questions requiring more than a sentence response
Advanced Fluency	The student has a near-native level of speech	Decide if … Retell …

This month I'm highlighting 3 projects or ideas that I plan to do with my students when they come back. I have talked in the past about how my students need to work on both language skills and build their sight word and word work knowledge.






 Before going to Christmas Break, I took some time and broke about all their running records. I looked at the errors they made as well as looking at the average errors made across all the running records I made for each reading level. So, my student reading at 10s--I looked at his errors, his error average since starting 10s, and an average of how long it took him to read 10s. I then asked myself why he was doing what he was doing. After all that I created a plan and a SMART goal for January. I normally don't plan out what books a student is going to read since with Guided Reading  I let the reader determine the path we take each week. But in this case because I set a SMART goal to more each student a reading level by the end of the month, I'm creating a plan for the month and hoping students blow the goal out of the water.

So what do I put inside of my folders for my students. In this case, I went back to my running records and looked at the errors they were making. Though they are at different reading levels, the error patterns were more or less the same--sight words and vocabulary. Like the one below, I used a circle map and the vocabulary from each book. I created maps specific to the book, so that my students could cut out the pictures and place them on the circle map.

 For sight word practice I created a play on this read, stamp, and write to help students work on sight words instead. We don't use Houghton Mifflin and have a building wide sight word list that they need to master. Each list has been tailored to each student to focus on the ones they need to learn.



A freebie for stopping by:

Working in a small district, my Speech-Language Pathologist is only in the building a couple days a week. Which makes collaboration with her very hard. I have a couple of students who have significant expressive language delays that make learning and making progress in reading very difficult for them.

I have used some of these activities to build both background knowledge and vocabulary to help with their comprehension of what they are reading. I have found that their first reads or cold reads of an instructional level text are at a frustrational read but by the second read its an instructional level. My SLP believes that this is because of their language delays.

I have decided to make a point at the beginning of each book to focus on their expressive language as part of their pre-reading. My hope is that by the end of the month these students have moved up a reading level.

Strategies to Develop Expressive Language Skills in the Classroom

• Opportunities to speak and time to rehearse before speaking
• Visual clues to help children order ideas effectively before expressing them
• Vocabulary lists to help with word finding difficulties. Use appropriate and consistent vocabulary
• Color coding different groups of words/sets of pictures
• Giving correct models of language structures
• Repetition and reinforcement of correct language structures
• Small group work to give children confidence to express themselves
• Appropriate questioning to give children the opportunity to reply
• Self-questioning and the development of learning scripts (e.g. What do I know already? What do I do next?)
• Rhymes
• Word play
• Restrict your language to short unambiguous language
• Story telling – cutting up picture segments and retelling stories
• Try and keep children ‘on topic’. Be specific, remind children e.g. ‘We are talking about…’
• Discussing what they have seen or done with an adult or more verbally able peer
• Puppet play/drama etc.
• Sharing books
• Revise links and associations between ideas and vocabulary – categorization/function/
• context/similarity/association
• As part of the partnership approach, it is important to detail which of these strategies have been most effective.

Barrier games

• This can be used for both talking and listening. The child or children either side of the barrier have identical sets of equipment.
• One child has a picture or constructs an assembly of objects and then gives instructions to the other to enable him/her to duplicate the picture or assembly.

How do I feel?

• In a small group imagine a situation and talk about how you would each feel and what you might say (speech bubbles resource is good here).

Silly Stories

• Collection of objects/pictures, e.g., horse, lady, man, child, dog, ball, pirate, dinosaur.  Adult starts story “Once upon a time there was a dinosaur”. Next child (house) continues the story “He lived in a house made of chocolate”.  Next child (ball) “One day he found a ball under his bed” …..

Narrative

• Color Coding approach.  Children take one color question ‘Who, What, Where, When’ and sequence a story using their own ideas.
• Mind Map Activities: An excellent way for supporting new vocabulary and talking.

Defining and describing

• Have a range of objects in a bag or a range of pictures. One child takes an object or picture and is allowed to give 3 pieces of information to describe their item. The rest guess.

Question Question

• Barrier game. Once child has an object or picture and the rest ask questions to find out what it is. You cannot say the name of the item.
• A good resource is Clowning Around or Guess Who?

What do you know?

• Use a composite picture and take turns in the group (mini circle time). Each child giving a new piece of information about the picture. Extend by talking about a particular object or event in which everyone has been involved.
• Tell me how to do it
• Use a classroom activity or event which has already been experienced and get a child to re-tell the event in his/her own words.
• Allow a child to explain to the others how to play a particular game.

Conversation

• In a small group it is possible to think about how we behave during a conversation and make explicit the skills we need. There are a couple of good resources for this.

Being mid-year, I find that I'm explaining why I'm selecting the text that I am. I walked into out book room and someone asked what I was looking for and I said no more than 2 words on a page with strong (if not in your face) picture support. I have a student that I've been working with on not adding to the text (she loves adding extra words to the story). The teacher in the book room pointed my to the a shelf on Level As. Knowing what text looks like at each level helps me find the right text for each group. I hope this helps you out or something you can share with parents.

Early Emergent Readers (Levels aa-C)

·         increasingly more lines of print per page
·         more complex sentence structure
·         less dependency on repetitive pattern and pictures
·         familiar topics but greater depth
·         beginning to use knowledge of letter sounds to solve unknown words
·         uses language, memory, pictures, and print as major cues to read and understand text
·         is able to predict what comes next

Early Fluent Readers (Levels K-P)

·         More pages
·         Longer sentences
·         More text per page
·         Richer vocabulary
·         Greater variation in sentence pattern
·         Less reliance on pictures
·         More formal and descriptive language
·         Analyzes new words and checks them against what makes sense and sounds right
·         Uses meaning to begin to self-correct
·         Uses known words and word parts to figure out unknown words
·         Begins to retell the major points of the text
·         Decreases the use of finger pointing as fluency and phrasing increase
·         Uses prior knowledge and own experience to make meaning

Fluent Readers (Levels Q-Z)

·         More text
·         Less familiar, more varied topics
·         Challenging vocabulary
·         More complex sentences
·         Varied writing styles
·         More description
·         Reads silently; reads fluently when reading aloud
·         Initiates topics for discussion about books
·         Begins to use comprehension strategies (retelling, monitoring for meaning, making connections, making mental images, making/revising/confirming predictions, questioning, determining importance, inferring, summarizing, synthesizing, critically evaluating) across genre and subjects
·         Consistently develops new strategies and new knowledge of texts as he/she encounters greater
variety of texts
·         Is in a continuous process of building background knowledge and realizes that he/she needs to
bring his/her knowledge to his/her reading
·         Sustains interest and understanding over long texts and reads over extended periods of time
·         Notices and comments on aspects of the writer’s craft

I hope everyone has a great week going into Christmas Break. Have a great holiday break and enjoy the Sight Word freebie below.

With Christmas approaching I always take time to reflect on some of my favorite things. One thing I have come to love is snow shoeing. Last year my parents retired to the Colorado Rockies, this was our first Christmas ever spend in the mountains. Go figure-right. I have lived in Colorado most of my life and have never spent Christmas in the mountains. As a family we went show shoeing. We took the dog-mine being Italian Greyhounds-had a grand time.

I'm donating a gift card from one of my favorite stores-Target. I need a 12 step program.  I love their $1 bins. They are perfect for everything from dressing my dogs to filling my treasure chest. I have to work at staying away. I get most of everything I need from Target. Have fun and enjoy the shopping trip.

I have a group of struggling learners who have had a hard time showing growth on Nonsense Word Fluency from Dibels. I created a set of cards that I can give students that have them sound out the nonsense word and then blend it back together again. They are perfect for reading centers, RTI Intervention work or struggling readers who need extra practice with nonsense words. This has do wonders to bring student scored up from an average of 40 sounds and no whole words to 15 whole words read correctly. This item is at my store for 50% off. Click on the picture.



Enjoy you Blog Hop! Have a great and safe holiday!




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This month I'm hooking up with Lisa from PAWSitively Teaching for a Pick 3 from Pinterest. The items I have picked out are ones that I can see my students doing over the next three weeks. Click on each picture to take a closer look on how these teachers created each Pinterest.


I work with preschool students and students who need to practice counting and one to one correspondence whenever I can build it in. Making snowmen would be perfect to tackle both of those. I could even see them cutting them out to work on fine motor skills. Who knew by creating snowmen that I could cram all those skills into them.

What do the tiers mean?

Description of Critical Elements in a 3-Tier RtI Model The following table outlines the essential features of a three-tier model of RtI including suggested ranges of frequency and duration of screening, interventions and progress monitoring. This is intended as guidance as they determine the various components of their RtI model.
Elements	Tier 1 Core Curriculum and Instruction	Tier 2 Supplemental Instruction	Tier 3 Increased Levels of Supplemental Instruction
Size of instructional group	Whole class grouping	Small group instruction (3-5 students)	Individualized or small group instruction (1-2 students)
Mastery requirements of content	Relative to the cut points identified on criterion screening measures and continued growth as demonstrated by progress monitoring	Relative to the cut points identified on criterion screening measures and continued growth as demonstrated by progress monitoring	Relative to the student’s level of performance and continued growth as demonstrated by progress monitoring
Frequency of progress monitoring	Screening measures three times per year  (DIBELS, AIMSWeb, iReady)	Varies, but no less than once every two weeks	Varies, but more continuous and no less than once a week
Frequency of intervention provided	Per school schedule	Varies, but no less than three times per week for a minimum of 20-30 minutes per session	Varies, but more frequently than Tier 2 for a minimum of 30 minutes per session
Duration of intervention	School year	9-30 weeks	A minimum of 15-20 weeks

What are the Benefits of RtI?

• RtI ensures a shared approach is used in addressing students’ diverse needs.
• Parents are a very important part of the process.
• RtI eliminates the “wait to fail” situation, because students get help promptly within the general education setting.
• The RtI approach may help reduce the number of students referred for special education services while increasing the number of students who are successful within regular education.
• RtI helps to identify the root cause of achievement problems.
• RtI’s use of progress monitoring provides more instructionally relevant information than traditional assessments

How Parents/Guardians can support at Home:

• Reading is Fundamental (These tips have been adapted from Reading is Fundamental (www.rif.org)
• Invite your child to read with you every day.
• When reading a book where the print is large, point word by word as you read.
• Read your child’s favorite book over and over again.
• Read many stories with rhyming words and repeated lines.
• Discuss new words and ideas.
• Stop and ask about the pictures and what is happening in the story. Encourage your child to predict.
• Read from a variety of materials including fairy tales, poems, informational books, magazines and even comic strips.
• Let your children see you reading for pleasure in your spare time.
• Take your child to the library. Explore an area of interest together
• Scout for things your child might like to read. Use your child’s interests and hobbies as starting points.

What should parents do if they believe their child is struggling?

• Contact your child’s teacher
• Request a parent/teacher conference
• Access the parent portal and other daily means of communication
• Review your child’s work to see if there is progress
• Talk with your child to ensure they know you are supporting them at home as well as in school

Be sure to stop by my Teachers pay Teacher store for great RtI progress monitoring tools during the 2-day Cyber Sale all items 28% off. My students love  my RTI: Nonsense Word Fluency Activities. Its a great way to open guided reading so students to practice going from the individual sounds to the whole word. 

What is Guided Reading?

Moving school districts means that this year I have had to create new ways for my students
to work with the vocabulary. One thing with Storytown I have come to love is the Intervention series vocabulary matches the grade level vocabulary. The teachers have also requested that I run one week ahead of them. This is nice because students work through the vocabulary with me before they have to do it in class. I can help students understand with word with examples but also they can practice how to apply the word using the story as a background. I also have to make sure that I give real life or real world examples of the word—in most cases these are words that they will come across in middle school but will never use with writing or in a conversation. (Which doesn't help them with text access.)

• Tally-Ho!-Display the vocabulary word card. Add a tally mark beside the word each time a student uses the vocabulary word in conversation.
• May I Have Your Autograph?-Display an enlarged print vocabulary word card. Allow students to autograph the card each time they use the vocabulary word in conversation.
• Vocabulary String-Scan and print the cover of each book from which vocabulary words are pulled. Attach a kite “tail” of string, yarn, ribbon, etc. to the cover. Print out vocabulary word cards and glue each card on the tail. Allow student to write their name on a clothespin and clip it to the word card each time they use the word in conversation.
• Don’t Lose Your Marbles!-Display the vocabulary word on the outside of a small jar. Add a marble to the jar each time a student uses the vocabulary word in conversation.
• Stick With It!-Display the vocabulary word card. Each time a student uses the vocabulary word in conversation, have him add a small sticker to the card.
• Just Scrolling Along!-On a computer that is visible to students, set the screensaver to scrolling text and type in the vocabulary words and/or definitions. Set the screensaver to come on after 5 minutes or so.
• Rock On!-Make a vocabulary jar by gluing a vocabulary word card to the outside of a jar. Allow students to drop a rock in the jar each time they use the vocabulary word in conversation.
• Vocabulary Vine-Make a crepe paper vine to wind across the walls in your classroom. Cut out leaves and write a vocabulary word on each leaf. Attach the leaves to your vine and watch students’ vocabulary grow!
• Word Wizard-Purchase clear name badges. Write the vocabulary word on a card. Slide the card into the badge holder. Allow a student to be the “Word Wizard”. He will wear the vocabulary word and should use the word throughout the day.
• Chain, Chain, Chain!-Cut out construction paper chain links. Each time a student uses a vocabulary word in conversation, have him write the vocabulary word on the link and add it to the chain. The chain will hang straight down from the ceiling. Display this poem:

• Vocabulary Pop!-Set a large jar on the counter. Each time a student uses a vocabulary word, drop a small handful of popcorn kernels in the jar. When the jar is full, have a popcorn party.
• Movin’ On!-Take a piece of yarn the width of your classroom and hang it above you. The yarn should start on one side of the room and stretch across it horizontally to attach to the other side of the classroom. On the far side, attach a blown up balloon. (Before blowing up the balloon, slip a piece of paper inside with the treat to be given written on it—class homework pass, 5 minutes extra recess, etc.) Attach a sign that says “Our vocabulary is moving on!” with a gym clip. Each time a student uses a vocabulary word, move the sign a bit toward the balloon. When the sign reaches the balloon, pop the balloon and read the prize. You can then start over with a new balloon and a new secret prize.

Here some ideas that I have used with my students that are more aligned with their learning styles. Most of these I have students do at home for practice. This gives them the chance to pick how they want to practice the words. It works great with spelling as well.

• Backwards Words- Write your words forwards, then backwards.
• Silly sentences -Use all your words in ten sentences.
• Picture words – Draw a picture and write your words in the picture.
• Words without Vowels – Write your words replacing all vowels with a line.
• Words without Consonants – Write your words replacing all consonants with a line.
• Story words – Write a short story using all your words.
• Scrambled words –Write your words, then write them again with the letters mixed up.
• Ransom words – Write your words by cutting out letters in a newspaper or magazine and glue them on a paper.
• Pyramid Words – Write your words adding or subtracting one letter at a time. The result will be a pyramid shape of words.
• Words-in-words – Write your word and then write at least 2 words made from each.
• Good Clean Words –Write your words in shaving cream on a counter or some other surface that can be cleaned safely.
• Etch-A-Word – Use an Etch- A-Sketch to write your words.
• Secret Agent Words – Number the alphabet from 1 to 26, then convert your words to a number code.
• Popsicles – Make words using popsicle sticks.
• Newspaper Words – Search a newspaper page from top to bottom, circling each letter of a word as you find it.
• Silly String – With a long length of string, “write” words using the string to shape the letters.
• Backwriting – Using your finger, draw each letter on a partners’ back, having the partner say the word when completed.
• Choo-Choo Words – Write the entire list end-to-end as one long word, using different colors of crayon or ink for different words.
• Other Handed – If you are right-handed, write with your left, or vice versa.
• Cheer your words – Pretend you are a cheerleader and call out your words! Sometimes you’ll yell, sometimes you’ll whisper.
• Reversed words – Write your words in ABC order - backwards!
• ABC order- Write your words in alphabetical order.
• Puzzle words – Use a blank puzzle form. Write your words on the form, making sure that the words cross over the pieces. Then cut them out (color if you wish) and put them in a baggie with your name on it.
• Pasta Words – Write your words by arranging alphabet pasta or Alphabits.
• Sound Words – Use a tape recorder and record your words and their spelling. Then listen to your tape, checking to see that you spelled all the words correctly.
• 3D words – Use modeling clay rolled thinly to make your words. Bring a note if done at home.
• Dirty Words – Write your words in mud or sand.

Have a great week with your family. I hope these ideas help are we are looking for new ways to spice up vocabulary work.