3 Strategic Reasons to Incorporate a Reading Intervention Toolkit in Your Elementary Classroom
Back-to-school season is officially past us.
Getting-to-know-you activities and lessons on routines and procedures are coming to an end and you know what that means…
Assessment season is now upon us!
And with it brings testing schedules, data analysis meetings, and planning for intervention groups.
Even though it is important work, the intervention process can be time-consuming, causing many teachers - already overwhelmed by other tasks - to delay planning for intervention groups. However, having a well-organized reading intervention toolkit can alleviate this burden by providing you with ready-to-use tools and strategies to support small-group literacy instruction, making planning a breeze!
The Importance of a Reading Intervention Toolkit
Once the diagnostic assessment data from the beginning of the school year has been analyzed, it’s time to use that data to form small groups for reading interventions.
And once those groups have been finalized and schedules have been approved, it’s time to start the planning process, which can be overwhelming.
As a classroom teacher or reading interventionist, you’re tasked with not only teaching during your literacy block but also managing your limited time and resources. This is where having a reading intervention toolkit can come in handy!
Not to mention meet the wide range of reading intervention strategies needed to support the wide range of instructional needs of your students.
With your elementary reading intervention toolkit, you’ll streamline your planning process while also providing engaging, multisensory activities that will captivate your students and promote lasting literacy growth and development.
Why You Need to Build a Reading Intervention Toolkit
In education, time is a finite resource.
And when you’re working with the lowest readers, you’re working on what seems like borrowed time, emphasizing the importance of maximizing your instructional time. This means that your engagement strategies need to not only be on-point but also need to support learning objectives and outcomes for the student.
This is why, as a reading interventionist, I loved my toolkit.
In it, I was able to, on the fly, be able to provide my students with engaging, hands-on activities that I could differentiate to support learners with whatever skill we were working on.
Here’s what building your own intervention toolkit can do for you and your intervention groups!
Organize Small Group Instruction
When planning for your intervention groups, utilizing hands-on activities is key to keeping students engaged, but it can also be time-consuming!
But not when you’ve built your reading intervention toolkit!
By assembling your literacy toolkit during your weekly planning, you’ll have materials ready to go when you need them! No more struggling to come up with interactive tools for your small group reading intervention.
For instance, if you have a group of students working on CVC short “a” words you can create a word hunt activity that utilizes Wikki Stix that students use to circle the short “a” words they find in a text. This is a quick and easy way to make the lesson both interactive and memorable!
Increase Student Engagement
As a teacher, I’m sure you know that incorporating hands-on activities has a big impact on student engagement.
It’s the same when it comes to planning for your reading intervention groups!
Using a reading intervention toolkit will elevate your small group literacy instruction while also helping students stay focused on learning targeted strategies for maximum impact. Incorporating hands-on activities is key to keeping students engaged and invested in the lesson, which is important when you are asking students to do hard things.
Here’s an example. For younger students practicing fluency, using fun tools like “witch fingers” to track their reading is a fun alternative to using their finger to track their reading. Or, for older students, using sticky notes to annotate and summarize texts can support students to have meaningful interactions with the text.
Differentiate Instruction to Meet All Learning Needs
Today’s classrooms are filled with diverse learning styles and levels, and your lessons should reflect that.
Do your students need activities that involve movement?
Or maybe something they can manipulate?
Perhaps they need a visual model?
Having multisensory reading intervention strategies is a must!
A curated literacy kit provides a variety of multisensory modalities to meet all the needs of all students. By incorporating visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile activities, your toolkit empowers students to build confidence in their reading skills, ultimately helping them become more self-assured readers.
How to Get Started with Your Own Toolkit
There you have it - three strategic reasons why incorporating a reading intervention toolkit is a must in your classroom.
By building your own toolkit, you’ll not only save time planning but also keep your students actively engaged in their literacy development.
If you’re interested in creating your own literacy intervention kit, join my FREE workshop, Reading Intervention Toolkit: A Make and Take Workshop for K-5 Teachers. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to assemble effective kits that help students master their reading interventions.
I hope to "see" you there!
— Shannon
