Essentials of Reading Intervention Guide 

Everything a Teacher Needs to Get Started

Setting up and organizing the logistics of reading intervention can be overwhelming, but there are a few things that will make the process so much easier. Here are 6 essentials you need in order to have smooth, effective, and stress-free reading interventions.

Speaking of stress-free, you can check out this blog post to find out the key to stress-free reading intervention!

Essentials of Reading Intervention: Getting Started

 

• List of Reading Intervention Essential Objectives and Skills

In order to make the most of reading intervention time and help students most efficiently, you NEED to have objectives. Both you and the student need to know what your goals for that session are. Having a clear objective helps you make sure your activities are actually practicing the skill you are trying to build, and helps the student stay focused in their practice.

 

To write clear objectives, it’s ESSENTIAL to understand the order and progression that students gain skills in. You could just intervene on what you are currently teaching, but if a student is really struggling to learn a skill, a lot of times there is an underlying gap you need to address first.

 

To help you see how reading skills are gained and give you a clear visual for planning your objectives, here is a FREE reading skills step ladder. It is a great reading intervention list of skills you can follow to guide your interventions.

• List of Students who Need Reading Intervention in those Skills

Now that you know what your objectives are, you need to identify the students you will be working with. You could just play it by ear and call back whoever seems to be struggling that day, but your time will be so much more efficient and your interventions will be so much more targeted if you plan out a list of who you need to work with.

 

How do you make that list? By using assessments (like this Comprehensive Reading Assessment), data tracking during guided reading (with the data sheets in these Reading Intervention Binders), tools like my free Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet (see below), or purposeful observation. Using your teacher’s gut is often effective. Just make sure it’s carefully thought out, and not decided on a whim in the moment. Go through and consider EACH student, noting any struggles they are having. Ideally, you would do Tier 2 interventions (small group) for any student scoring between 75-85% accuracy, and Tier 3 interventions (one-on-one) with any student who scores below 75% accuracy.

 

Catching the Tricky Ones

Just a note, there are different types of reading difficulties your students can have, and each one will need different interventions. You can read about each type and how to help them in this blog post all about The Science of Reading (scroll down to the “Types of Reading Difficulties” section). The trickiest type of difficulty to catch is the compensator group. They struggle with decoding words, but make up for it with strong language and comprehension skills. Using a quick screener (like the one in my Comprehensive Reading Assessment) on ALL students to catch any compensators will help these students not slip through the cracks.

• A Reading Intervention Plan for How to Close the Gap

                                        Plus Bonus Freebie!

Every student is different and has different needs. That can make the planning of reading intervention so hard! But understanding where a student is struggling in, and then how to help them in that area is CRUCIAL. I’ve created a FREE Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet that can help you identify who is struggling, what area of reading they are struggling in, and tips and activities for each area that will help them. Use this cheat sheet as a guide while making your plan for each student, so you can be sure they are getting targeted help where they need it.

 

The first part of the cheat sheet lists struggling student characteristics. It’s important to look out for the warning signs of different problems. These signs can give you a clue of where to start your intervention. These lists show characteristics of students struggling in each area of reading, so you can quickly identify who is struggling and their areas of trouble.

 

Also on the cheat sheet are tips for each area of reading, so once you know where students struggle, you can implement teaching that will be most effective for them in their needs. You can use the activity ideas list to plan out specific activities that will target their struggle areas, and you can rest assured knowing you are giving them practice in the areas they need it most.

• Activities that DIRECTLY Practice those Skills

When we have a limited amount of time to work with students, each minute is precious! We need to make sure that the activity we have students doing is practicing exactly the skill we want students to be building. You can find activities directly related to different skills in my Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet mentioned above, and also in my Ultimate List of Reading Intervention Activities blog post.

So for example, if our objective is to have students blend CVC words, it would not be a good activity to have students do a cut-and-paste sorting activity and sort the CVC words by their vowels. First of all, much of the time would be spent practicing cutting and gluing skills. Those are very important skills for children to learn, but our intervention time is targeted at the essential skills we are intervening on. Additionally, they would just be practicing looking at letters in words and sorting by like letters. There is no blending sounds together to read CVC words going on!

 

A better activity would be to build CVC words together with letter tiles and practice blending the sounds and reading the words. Or, you could have a list of words and matching pictures. Sound out the words together by blending, and then have the student point to the picture it matches. This page in my CVC Reading Intervention Binder would be another good activity to practice blending CVC words.

 

Sometimes in our efforts to be engaging and interesting, our intervention activities start to become focused on “fun” and “cute” rather than directly targeting the skill we are trying to build. Now, there is nothing wrong with fun and cute activities, as long as the action the students are doing is practicing exactly the skill we are trying to build.

• A Way to Track Progress and Effectiveness of Reading Intervention

When we are doing our intervening, we need to know that our reading interventions are actually working and our students are progressing. In order to know this, we need to have a way to track the progress of reading intervention. I love using data tracking sheets. You can have one for the whole class and keep everyone’s data altogether, or you can have a page for each individual student.

 

I have data tracking sheets to go with each activity in my Reading Intervention Binders that make progress monitoring super easy. Or you can check out this Ultimate Progress Monitoring Bundle with QUICK progress monitoring assessments and tracking sheets included (there’s a fluency tracking sheet in that bundle you can try for free!).

 

You can also use a graph for students to fill out each session of how many words they read in a timed reading, how many sight words they got correct, or how many words they sounded out. Having students fill out their own graphs (like in this free reading fluency tracker) can be super motivating for the student!

• A Place to Pull Students Back to Work With Them

When doing your reading interventions, you want students to be as focused as possible. This includes removing them from peers and other distractions. Try to find a place in your room where you can sit down with your student and be able to look at each other and have a focused conversation. My favorite place to pull students back to is my guided reading table, with students’ backs to the rest of the room. The teacher can sit behind the table facing the student, or right next to the student.

 

It is also super helpful to make a Reading Intervention Toolkit that has any materials or supplies you might need for quick and easy reading activities).

 

If you have a super distractible kiddo, it might be a good idea to enlist a volunteer or work with them when you have another adult supervising your class. Set up a desk in the hallway for the student to sit at. You can have a volunteer work with them out in the hall, or if you have another adult supervising your class, you can work with them out in the hall (but you will likely need to keep the door open to keep an eye on your class!).

 

Those 6 tips are absolutely key in the start-up of reading intervention in your classroom. You have the amazing position and capacity as a teacher to help struggling readers in the way they need it most. By using effective interventions for reading, you can help each and every one of your students succeed! If you need help figuring out which of your kiddos needs some extra help, download my FREE Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet. It gives you key characteristics of students struggling in each reading area, as well as specific tips and activities to target those areas.

 

 

Happy teaching and reading!