Reading Intervention List of Tips to Make Life Easier
Interventions in the classroom can be easy with these 5 teaching tips.
Teaching struggling readers can be hard, so here is a reading intervention list of tips that will make your intervention time easier and less stressful. As a teacher, you can make an impact on your lowest students while still remaining calm, organized, and happy!
Plus, here is a bonus FREE Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet you can download here that will make your reading intervention a breeze. It helps you identify where your students are struggling, gives tips on how to help in those areas, and shows specific reading activity examples that will give them the practice they need.
Intervention in reading doesn’t have to be overwhelming with this free cheat sheet.
Here is a reading intervention list of tips to make your life easier.
Reading Intervention List of Sanity-Saving Tips
Having reading interventions tools in a kit ready to go can simplify your teaching.
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Have a Reading Intervention Toolbox
The first tip to making your interventions for reading easier is to have a toolbox of reading tools and gadgets to keep at your table. Fill it with props you can use as quick and easy (yet meaningful) reading activities with your struggling readers. This blog post goes into detail about how to set up your own reading intervention toolbox, and here is a link to my amazon store, where you can check out the “reading intervention tools” category for ideas.
Some ideas include reading pointers (for fluency), tap lights (tap beginning/middle/end sound for phonemic awareness), dice (roll to answer comprehension questions), and index cards to make on the fly flashcards.
Just stick it all in a tub or basket, and keep it at your guided reading table. There should be activities for a variety of different skills so you can address what any student needs.
Having all of these easy materials on hand will be so helpful for you in those moments when you have to come up with an activity on the spot, or if you just want to get super efficient with your routines and have everything ready. Pull it out during small groups time, or when you pull students back for one-on-one interventions.
This classroom teaching strategy can make your interventions go so much smoother.
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Set Up Routines
Transitions are notorious for eating up valuable teaching time, and for making the classroom a little chaotic. If you can set up a solid routine for starting and running your interventions, it will make them go so much more smoothly and efficiently. Students will stay on task more, and you will spend less time trying to tame chaos and “herd cats.”
Definitely have a routine for calling students back. Teach all students to stay focused on their task when you are working with a student, and teach them to come back immediately when you call their name and sit with you at the table.
It also helps to have routines you follow within your actual intervention time. Follow the same format each time, repeating the same schedule with the skills you work on or types of activities you do. So for example, if you are doing fluency interventions, you could follow the routine:
- Warm-up with some quick sight-word flash cards or sentence fluency activities.
- Do a cold read with a new fluency passage (time for 1 minute and record their rate and accuracy).
- Go over any hard words with them and let them practice the passage on their own for a couple minutes.
- Do another hot read with that same passage (time and record their rate and accuracy to compare improvement).
Or, you could just follow a routine with how all of your lessons are setup. You can use this explicit instruction cycle in your lessons, so students already know what is expected of them and be ready for what’s next.
- Start every task by modeling (“I do”)
- Then do the task together (“We do”)
- Then have the student do the task on their own (“You do”)
Have a classroom volunteer give your struggling readers extra practice.
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Use Volunteers
As much as we want to, sometimes there is just not enough time for teachers to do all the things. When it comes to the point where it is impossible to give your struggling students enough one-on-one time, it is better for them to get some of that help from someone else than not at all.
If you are lucky enough to have classroom volunteers, use them for reading intervention! It can be soooo tempting to have them do all the things you really don’t want to do (like cut out all that lamination, or put up a bulletin board), but their time might be more valuable working with students. They can sit in the back at your guided reading table or pull a desk out into the hallway for them to read one-on-one with students.
I love to have volunteer kits put together so if I do have someone come in to help, I can give them the kit and they’re ready to go, without me having to stop and explain everything. Here’s what you would need in a volunteer kit:
- A binder labeled “Volunteers”
- An instruction page at the very beginning explaining how you want the interventions done
- A reading intervention list of students you want them to work with on a loose piece of paper in the front pocket (so it’s easy to change out when needed)
- Reading passages, short books, and/or reading activities that practice the skill you are targeting
- Optional: data tracking sheets for the volunteer to fill out as they work with the students, so you can see the progress and tell if it is effective
You can put together your own intervention binders, or just print out some already-made print-&-teach binders like these.
No prep strategies to teach reading can make your life easier.
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Use-No-Prep Activities
One of the best tips that will save your sanity is having an arsenal of no-prep activities in your back pocket to use at a moments’ notice. Sometimes we have an unexpected spare minute to work with a student, or (let’s be real), we just didn’t have the time or energy to plan and prepare an activity. That’s when it’s great to pull out some easy activities
It is very helpful to have that toolbox we talked about earlier, already loaded with fun materials that you can use for these activities (think sticky-notes, dice, or index cards). While you are teaching with these activities, it’s helpful to keep in mind these 11 Reading Intervention Strategies.
Some of my favorite no-prep activities include:
- Make words or letters out of play-dough or blocks.
- Write the rime of a word family on an index card, and individual letters on sticky notes. Rotate out the letters to make and read new words.
- Use white boards and dry-erase markers to write words, underline phonics patterns, and practice reading them.
- Pass out letter tiles and make words.
- Use the “paragraph cover-up” shown in this blog post–> 8 Strategies for Reading Comprehension, for a comprehension activity (strategy #5).
- Record students reading with your phone, play it back and have them follow along in the book again as they listen, then have them read it one more time.
I have TONS more fun activity ideas in my Ultimate List of Reading Intervention Activities, organized by learning style you can check out too!
One of my favorite strategies for teaching reading is using intervention binders.
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Have “Ready-to-Go” Activities
No prep activities are great on the fly because, well, they require no prep! But sometimes they do require a bit more brain power, and it’s easier to have some “Pre-Prepped” activities all ready to go.
Whether you need something that is self-explanatory for volunteers, or something that is super quick for when you have a few spare minutes to pull students back, make sure that you have a quick and easy go-to intervention tool.
These include resources that you have made or put together already, but that you can use over and OVER again. They take an initial investment of time and effort, but are so worth it to re-use all year long. Just keep them back by your intervention spot, and pull them out whenever you need a quick activity.
Some ideas include:
- Laminated card games or board games
- Sight words or fluency strips laminated on rings
- Fluency pyramids or flip books
- Differentiated reading passages printed out and laminated or put in a binder
- Interactive books
- Intervention binders
- Multisyllabic words syllable ladders/chunking chards
I have always had intervention binders with tons of reading intervention activities to practice each skill, plus data tracking pages for everything. It does initially take a bit of prep to set up, but it will be so worth it for the rest of the year! If you want something that is already put together for you, check out my Reading Intervention Binders. All you have to do is print and put in page protectors, and you are good to go!
This reading intervention list of sanity-saving tips is golden, and I promise, it will make your life SO much easier. You already have enough on your plate to worry about, don’t let reading intervention stress you out!
Still feeling overwhelmed though? Find out the key to stress-free reading intervention here, and remember, YOU are an amazing teacher, and you ARE making a difference.
Happy teaching and reading!
