ES Literacy Reading Grade 3: Intervention

At this point in the year, your scholars should be reading at or above a level O. Moving into the O–Q text band requires scholars to hold onto the plot and ideas across chapters. Eventually scholars need to not only understand characters’ traits but also to understand at the upper level how and why characters change. In nonfiction at this text band, scholars are increasingly encountering texts with implicit main ideas, more challenging vocabulary, a wider variety of text features and structures, and more-academic vocabulary.

Given the complex thinking work that kids will need to do to reach the Level P end-of-year benchmark, you are probably getting increasingly concerned about your reading emergencies— scholars who are reading below grade level or whose reading skills are not progressing. You also are likely concerned about kids who are on the cusp of meeting grade-level expectations, who you think with some targeted intervention could be become much stronger readers.

In this unit, your job is to act on the data you’ve gathered to move your emergency and cusp kids, while setting up structures to continue to support on-grade-level scholars.

If you do your job well, ALL emergency and cusp scholars will achieve one level of growth, so that by the end of this unit, you will have fewer scholars approaching or below expectations than you did in the previous F&P cycle.

It is imperative that ALL your scholars are reading at home and at school. Meet with the parents of any scholars who are not reading at home. If you cannot convince parents to ensure that their children are doing their homework, you need to manage up to leadership.

It is your responsibility to ensure that ALL of your scholars are reading 6 days a week at home!

Planning for the intervention unit should mirror the work you do for planning the launch of any unit. First and foremost, you must start with your own adult practice and what you plan on doing differently during this unit. You’ve been teaching reading and writing across the components. At this point, you will have some scholars whom you’ve successfully moved. Identify what you have done that has worked, then replicate this with other scholars. You’ve also had the experience of trying to intervene and failing. Identify what didn’t work and stop doing it! If you are unsure how to effectively move a scholar, reach out to your leader or labsite teachers to help you determine what moves you need to make.

Step 1: Identify Trends Across Your Cusp and Emergency Scholars

Look holistically at your reading and writing data and scholar work and ask yourself:

For scholars reading below grade level or who are stuck, what is holding them back?

Reading

• When I look at my Guided Reading Notes and F&P data, is comprehension, accuracy, or fluency holding this scholar back?
  • Comprehension
    • Fiction
      • Are scholars holding onto meaning across a text?
      • Can they identify the main problem the character faces?
      • Can they make accurate inferences about the character’s traits and/or feelings?
      • When applicable, can they identify the lesson the character or the reader learns?
    • Nonfiction
      • Can my scholars articulate the main idea of a section or paragraph, or do they tend to focus on simply recalling details?
      • Do they use the title and text features, including headings, to help them comprehend?
  • Accuracy
    • Do scholars pay attention to word endings?
    • Do they self-correct?
    • Do scholars cross-check that what they read makes sense, sounds right, and looks right?
  • Fluency
    • Do they pause appropriately for punctuation?
    • Do they read with expression?
    • Do their reading logs show that they are reading independently at an appropriate rate?

Writing

• When you look at scholar work, are they thinking flexibly about the main idea?
• Do their written responses have accurate ideas?
• Are they using the genre and thinking job to think flexibly about the text?

What does this tell me about my practice? What can I as the adult do differently?

• Am I making kids responsible for the thinking work by asking them to do the majority of the talking?
• Am I demanding that kids have ideas when they speak, read, and write?
• Am I consistently giving kids feedback and coaching them around their goals?
• Am I following up to make sure kids are applying their goals every time they read?

Step 2: Identify Small Groups for Cusp and Emergency Scholars

Identify any trends that apply to small groups. Which scholars are facing similar challenges?

Step 3: Set Goals and Plan for Holding ALL Kids Accountable

• Set time-bound goals for all your scholars. Make a plan for when you will coach scholars, and hold them accountable for reaching these goals.
• For reading emergencies and cusp scholars, determine what you will tackle in small groups during Independent Reading, and through 1:1 coaching. For your cusps and emergencies, set a bite-sized goal for the week.
• Although your focus is on moving reading emergencies and your cusp scholars, you need to put in place structures that will continue to press kids reading on or above grade level to achieve strong growth.
  • Set qualitative goals for kids reading on and above grade level to ensure that they make progress as readers. Since these scholars need less support, set a goal for a two-week period.
  • Check in once or twice a week in either Guided Reading or during Independent Reading to coach high fliers and scholars reading on grade level, and hold them accountable for their goals.

Step 4: Investing Parents

Reflect on how you’ve already invested parents in their scholars’ growth.

• Do you need to:
  • Communicate more frequently with parents?
  • Hold parents accountable for making sure kids are completing their reading logs?
  • Invest parents in helping their scholars develop a true passion for reading?
  • Meet with parents to ensure that they know their scholars’ goals and can support them at home?
  • Celebrate scholar growth more often with parents?

This is not the time to reinvent the wheel to move your scholars as readers! Leverage the resources available on the Ed Institute Library to help you build a plan to address scholar needs. Below are suggested resources and tips to help you determine which lessons and goals will best help small groups of scholars meet their specific challenges, as well as keeping your whole class on track.

You should use your scheduled Reading time (50 minutes) for intervention and continue to have a separate Guided Reading block (30 minutes). Continue to teach Shared Text and Read Aloud to the whole class.

• Engagement During Independent Reading: All kids need time to practice and enjoy reading. Often the kids who struggle most are the ones who spend the least amount of time reading. These kids may not have found books they love, or they may have poor reading stamina. Your job is to match kids with great books they will love and to hold them accountable for reading.
• Be Strategic About Lesson Structure: You do not need to teach a whole-class lesson every day. For example, you may divide scholars into two small groups instead of teaching a whole-group lesson. However you must have scholars read independently and discuss books in partnerships daily, and shop for books at least once a week. Failing to include these parts of the Reading lesson will negatively impact scholar growth.
• Tactics of Great Readers: Look at the 5 tactics of great readers as a starting place to help you analyze how to best support kids. Often when scholars move to higher reading levels and are faced with more challenging texts, they need to revisit these key strategies. For example, when reading an easier text, a scholar may have been able to automatically make
  a mind movie when the tagging of dialogue was clear; but now that she’s confronted with untagged dialogue and multiple characters in a conversation, this skill is breaking down.
• Additional Resources:
  • Prior Units: Don’t assume that just because you taught a unit, scholars have truly internalized the thinking work that you taught. Look back at the units you’ve already taught to identify teaching points that merit re-teaching based on your data and your study of scholar work.
  • Text Levels: Use what you know about text levels to plan goals for kids. Identify goals for scholars who are reading in the same text band.
  • Leveled Literacy Intervention: Use the Level Literacy Intervention resources and materials to tailor small-group instruction.

Below are are some common, predictable problems that scholars reading below grade level in Grade 3 are likely facing and how to address these problems.

Scholar Issues and How to Address

Connecting ideas across pages
Teach scholars to…

• Think about the title and/or headings as they read, and how the events or information in the text connect back to the title.
• Stop after each section or page and think about how this connects to what they’ve already read.
• Notice repetition—words, phrases, or ideas that carry over from page to page.
• Think and talk about the sections of a text or a collection of pages, instead of thinking page by page.

Holding onto meaning across longer texts
*Texts with multiple episodes connected to one problem require scholars to prioritize and synthesize.

• Teach scholars to…
  • Pay attention to story elements: the main character, the problem they run into, and how it is resolved.
  • Pay attention to the character’s feelings or traits, which often are related to or help them solve the problem.
  • Identify the big problem by thinking about the outcome and how this connects back to problems revealed in the text.
  • Use story structure—the way stories tend to go—to zero in on what is most important/the main problem and outcome.

Using meaning and/or context to figure out challenging words
Teach scholars to….

• Check the picture and think, What’s happening in the picture? What word would make sense?
• Notice words whose meaning they don’t know and come up with options that make sense using the picture, sentence, and/or what they know so far.
• Reread the whole sentence once they’ve figured out a challenging word.

Looking through the whole word to read accurately
Teach scholars to…

• Look for a part, or chunk, of the word that they already know, and then notice what’s different and try to read the word.
• Look for letters that go together to make sounds, and read them together.

Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of Reading Intervention.

As a result of teaching this unit, you, as the teacher, have:

• Continued to press all kids to achieve strong reading growth by setting up strong structures for Independent Reading, including goal-setting and matching kids to books.
• Set clear goals for kids based on what you know about them holistically as readers.
• Strategically planned and executed instruction to address the needs of emergencies and cusp scholars.
• Held scholars accountable for using their goals and coached them to use strategies to reach their goals.

Your emergency and cusp scholars should have grown by at least one reading level, so that you have decreased the total number of scholars whose reading skills are below grade-level expectations or approaching expectations from the number whose skills were at these levels during the last F&P cycle.

All scholars should be able to apply strategies to hold onto meaning across texts. They should also be able to connect ideas across pages to identify the main idea of a section or of the whole book.

Celebrate your scholars’ successes by acknowledging what they can now do as readers as a result of their work over the last several weeks.

Reflect on your successes and stretches, as well as those of your scholars. Look at your F&P results. Have your scholars grown as readers over the last month?

Scholars must read at home, as well as in school. Are 100% of your kids reading 6 days a week at home? Make sure at-home reading is happening, and meet with families who are falling short to recommit them to this team effort. Also make a plan to ensure that 100% of your scholars read daily during any school breaks. How have you effectively motivated kids and families to read when school is in session, and how can you replicate this success when kids are on break?

Are 100% of your kids reading fluently? Are they using all of the tools at their disposal to figure out the meaning of what they are reading?

Are 100% of your kids doing their literacy homework?

Going into the next unit, make specific reading goals for yourself. Set a percentage goal for how many children you will move in the next 15 days. Set a goal for children who are not reading at home. Who will you get to consistently read at home? Do they understand what they’re reading? What is their struggle with decoding? How will you partner with parents to support their growth?

If you are having trouble meeting your goals, do not wait until you have NOT succeeded. Consult your colleagues. Consult your leaders. ASK FOR HELP so you can meet your goals!