Fahrenheit Rm. 41

We finally got the textbooks for my reading intervention class one week after school started. I was kind of freaked out when I found out I was not going to be starting with the textbook I had spent a week being trained to use and for which I had made lesson plans to last me through December.

But once I thought about what I could do to fill a week, I realized it was a good thing. Of course, there wasn't much change to my plans for the first day: introductions, school rules, etc. But I got to spend the next five days doing things I had wished I had more time for last year. I read to them every day. Some of the days I read out of Jim Trelease's Read All About It! The other days I read picture books that I found in my classroom.(Thanks to Mr. E who had a copy or two of every book used by the school in the last ten years and left them all here.) On the very first day I read "Alexander and the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." That was one of my favorites when I was younger. I could totally relate to Alexander.

Then, I introduced sight words. I gave them all copies of the Dolch list and had them practice reading it. When I turned on a timer, they all got into it. I also taught about context clues. I had to use the at-level text for the information, but for the practice, I designed a word organizer that guided them through the process. By the end of those few days they seemed to all have grasped the concept, even if they still had difficulty using it.

Now we have our textbooks and we need to get back on track to catch up with our pacing calendar. Hopefully, we will have time to whip out our Dolch lists every once in a while for a quick read through, and I already have planned a few read-alouds that will go along with the units in our book. It wasn't all that long, but hopefully this little literacy basics week will have them even more prepared now to begin our official curriculum.