Today the first grade, our reading consultant, school counselor, principal and myself met to go over the results of the last PSI assessment for the first graders on short vowels.  Since this is only our 4th month into the RTI journey. it was decided that we need to slow down a bit and spend another month focusing on short vowels.  Once again I will be working with the lowest scoring 5 children in 1st grade.  This will require me to learn more new materials which I will check out during Christmas break. 

Today I gave the PASI to the little guys in my group.  It's so exciting to be able to show growth and mark progress for all three.  It was very interesting to find out that my predictions on who was learning the most and who was struggling the most to be totally wrong.   The child I thought to be struggling the most, the one who was the most wiggly and seeming to be off task the most was the one who scored the highest of the three.  An argument for data collection if I ever saw one.

Progress

My first grade RTI group currently consists of three very wiggly and active boys.  They also scored the lowest of all first graders on the PASI.  Yesterday we were learning onset and rime.  My most impaired little guy said with great confidence, "Hey, I know this.  These words rhyme!"  The look on his face said it all.

Did you ever have a time when the answer was there in front of you all the time but you just didn't or couldn't see it?  Well, that's exactly how I feel about RTI and the 4th grade kids I'm working with.  After three weeks of  looking at test scores and seeing the areas that need remediation, it hit me!  What these students need is an intervention for math vocabulary.  We assume that the kids understand the vocabulary because we use it all the time, we give examples on the board, we have them do math boxes in which we speak the vocabulary to them.  But in reality, they're just pretending to understand. They're not willing to take the risk to say I don't get it in front of their peers, and so they say nothing at all.  They take the math test and fail woefully and we wonder why.

Upon analyzing the test questions that are most often missed in this group of kids it suddenly became apparent that everything they miss is vocabulary based.  These few kids need more time to process the new vocabulary words, try them out for size, see how they work and how they interrelate with the math terms they already know.  It is my job to make it more user friendly for them.

Thank goodness for You Tube.  I have found some wonderful resources on You Tube that I can take and mold into appropriate activities for my groups, which by the way are mostly boys.

I found a very cute video with kids singing a song for perpendicular and parallel lines.  I realized that my boys would NOT go for that so my aide and I changed it into a chant, along with some arm movements and they love it.  Here is the chant (minus the arm movements)

Perpendicular
Parallel
These are the lines we know so well.
Intersecting lines
They cross
Know this and you won't get lost.
Lines have two ends
Rays have one
Line segments have two
Now you're done!

The kids like it, we do it every day for now...and soon we'll be moving on to "I Am A Parallelogram"  You can see on YouTube.

In the process of learning RTI, I have begun to learn how to use The Phonological Awareness Screener for Intervention™ (PASI™) and Phonics Screener for Intervention™ (PSI™) .  These two diagnostic screeners pinpoint specific skill deficits and facilitate teachers’ grouping of students for focused intervention based on the screener results..  I have been practicing giving these tests to the students in my classroom with some eye openings results. 

Yesterday I gave the PASI to one of my 3rd grade students who has many decoding skills but a very low fluency rate of 25 WPM.  I discovered she is not able to remember a three word phrase and repeat it back to me with any accuracy.  She is able to repeat and retain two word phrases but not three words or more.  She also has difficulties in substituting one letter or syllable in a word for another letter or syllable.   For example say cupcake.  Change cup to pan.  What's the new word?  She said cuppan.   Finally she is struggling with segmentation.  She is able to do some basic segmenting such as /m/ /a/  /p/ for map but she is not able to segment blends at the beginning or end of a word.  These are skills that should be mastered in kindergarten, first grade at the latest.  

I love that I can take these screeners and pinpoint exactly where I need to step in and add focused instruction to help her become a more fluent reader. 

After studying the picture the 95% Group sent us, I proceeded to organize my kit in a like manner only to discover that I do not have enough dividers to replicate their picture.  My kit has 12 dividers...their kit appears to have about 30....humm.  So did they forget to stick some dividers into my kit or what?

The top picture shows how we finally decided to arrange the phonics awareness manipulative kits.

However, one of my co-workers sent an email to the 95% Group asking them exactly how people arranged the kit and they sent us the photo on the left.

Interesting how a group of people can look at  the same exact items and organize them in a totally different manner.  Clearly we could not visualize the best way to do organize all our materials. Notice in the top picture we only have 20 separate boxes  with much less materials in that box.  The bottom box has every item that needs to be in the box - in the box!  We didn't know what to do with the sets we couldn't fit into our storage box, so we put them into zip lock bags and then stored them in another plastic tote.  We knew it wasn't efficient or correct but we were stumped.  Thank goodness for digital photography and email!

The 4th grade RTI math groups are really enjoying working with markers and small white boards.  We are re-teaching lines, line segments, rays, parallel lines and congruent lines.  The kids are motivated and engaged!  It's exciting to see them being successful.