Flipping

I am flipping over the fact that my spring break has officially started!!  

Because of this, I thought it was appropriate to share the "Flip the Sound" chart I created to remind my students to try different sounds for the letters listed when they are decoding puzzling words.

Is anyone else on break as of today also?  I am very excited to spend some quality time with my family, to scrub my house from top to bottom, and to get some much needed odds and ends completed!  Plus, I am hoping to have some extra time to stalk some of my favorite blogs!!

Thanks so much!
~ Mrs. Mc

Letter Sound Assessment

Here is the form I use when assessing my students’ letter and sound knowledge.  I just also added the four basic digraphs to the same form.

I start by having them go through and name the upper case letters and say each sound.  I then move on to the lower case letters.  I try to use a different color each time I assess.  This way I can use the same form and also see their progress over time.

Hope you find this useful!
~Mrs. Mc

Anecdotal Notes

The last two years I have been tweaking the form I use to record anecdotal notes on my students and I think I am finally happy with it! (Well, I haven't changed it yet since the beginning of this year at least!)  Here it is:

The top half includes two blank boxes to write notes and the bottom half includes an area to record a running record (RR).  A colleague of mine had shared a print-out of a RR for 100 words using 100 boxes. To get the student’s accuracy you would just subtract the number of errors from 100% (ex. 7 errors would equal 93%).  How easy is that?  Since I try to complete a RR on each student at least once per week, I wanted to include it on the same form as my notes.  I also document the student’s words per minute (WPM) and circle/comment about their phrasing and expression.

The bottom of the form has simple codes that I circle for each reading strategy the child uses.  My district has adopted these strategies from Donna Scanlon’s Interactive Strategies Approach (ISA).  You can read more about the ISA in a book they recently published called, Early Intervention for Reading Difficulties: The Interactive Strategies Approach (Solving Problems in the Teaching of Literacy)

Here is a list of what the codes mean:

        CP=Check the Pictures

        TS=Think about the Sounds in the word First, Last, Medial

        MS=Think of words that might Make Sense

        WP=Look for Word Families or Parts you may know.

        RP=Read Past the word

        SA=Go back to the beginning of the sentences and Start Again

        DP=Try Different Pronunciations for some of the letters.

        BW=Break the Word into smaller parts

        IC=Uses multiple strategies in an Interactive and

                Confirmatory Way

~  Mrs. Mc