The pieces of evidence are the pictures and descriptions of some of the reading resources that I use and share with other teachers. Being a reading specialist, the other teachers ask me for resources (testing materials, fluency passages, phonics lessons) advice, or help with students who are struggling with reading instruction. The intervention leaders refer teachers to me when new teachers bring students to Response to Intervention (RtI) and I am working to create a Reading Support Staff team that will provide support for all teachers and students.
The resources pictured here are tools that I use everyday for reading instruction. I also share these resources with my fellow teachers. The Recipe for Reading books come from the Orton-Gillingham approach for reading that uses a multi-sensory technique for phonics instruction. I like the sequence for introducing letters because it has students sounding out words and reading books after only learning a few letters. The Power Tools for Literacy book is an amazing resource because it has lessons designed to explicitly teach phonics and spelling patterns to all readers. This text would pair well with Words Their Way and can be used for word work and word studies. The CORE Reading Assessments and Source Book are great tools for digging into reading difficulties and tackling any reading deficits. I use these books to do beginning, middle, and end of the year progress monitoring, or for assessing where a student’s struggle might originate.
The wrap-ups are great tools that I found online that provide an interesting, physically manipulative way to learn vocabulary. This set contains wrap-ups that are useful for practicing synonyms, antonyms, homophones and compound words.
Task cards are useful in many different ways; they can be used for practice, warm-ups, lessons, assessments, and exit tickets. I have some for phonemic awareness and literacy skills, like identifying Author’s Purpose, text features, main idea/details, and summarizing to name just a few.
I like to use the fluency strips to encourage reading for accuracy and these strips make it easy to set goals and give incentives for finishing the set.
CVC Word manipulative blocks are a nice way to practice decoding words and this set is nice because they can practice with rhyming words and phoneme manipulation (for example, they can see what happens when you change the “n” in “can” to a “p”).
The Secret CVC words are a big hit with students! And I love them because it is a nice way to practice phonemic awareness and decoding – there are also Secret Sight Words for practicing sight word recognition.
The Paragraph Writing tools are writing prompts for three genres of writing, narrative, informative, and opinion. There are graphic organizers for the brainstorming, planning, rough draft, revising, and final draft parts of the writing process. I use these for my students who have writing goals.
How Does This Evidence Demonstrate Proficiency of the Standard?
- My strength is being able to identify the areas in which students are struggling, for example, I can give a few CORE assessments and analyze the scores as well as the student to be able to design a targeted intervention (element A).
- I am familiar with the assessments and can suggest which assessment a teacher should administer to a student to gather needed information (element D).
- I am always looking for engaging, yet effective resources to help with the targeted intervention; for example, a phonics notebook that helps students track their learning in an organized way (element A).
Katie Brown's Education Adventure 