How to Lesson Plan for Your Literacy Intervention

An effective lesson planning process has the potential to transform your year.

For us educators, lesson planning can reduce stress because we have everything outlined. It also saves us a ton of time in the long run.

But did you know that lesson planning also benefits our students? When we have clear plans, students begin understanding routines, and the increased cohesion between our lesson components helps them get better results!

Even with all of the benefits, lesson planning for your intervention sessions can seem daunting! We believe it shouldn’t have to be!

Click here to download our FREE lesson planning guides, then continue reading for more information about each step in this process.

There are five easy steps we follow that make lesson planning for our intervention sessions a breeze.

Step 1: Outline Skill Buckets

Before creating our lesson plans, we need to determine the skills that students need to work on (this is our scope).

The great news is that the National Reading Panel already outlined the five core components of literacy for us! They identified that SOR-aligned literacy lessons need to target phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension.

As we think about our lesson plans, we need to determine which subskills of these 5 core components we will target with our particular students. You can reference student IEP goals, data, and standards to determine the subskills you would like to target throughout your intervention interval.

On page 3 of the intervention lesson planning guides, we have outlined subskills for each of the 5 core components. You can check off the skills you plan to work on with your students as well as write in any additional skills you want to target.

Step 2: Outline Skill Progressions

Once we have outlined these skills, we want to think about the order in which we will teach them (this is our sequence!).

We don’t need to hit each of the 5 core components in each lesson, but we will want to make sure we are targeting them all throughout our intervention interval.

On page 4 of the lesson planning guides, we can determine when we would like to introduce which skills so that they build upon one another.

Step 3: Collect Data & Determine Student Needs

The next step is data collection.

We will need data to understand where our students are starting and determine specific goals for our time with them.

We want to collect data on all five core components of reading & writing so we have a baseline for our students.

If you already have an assessment that measures each of these areas, awesome! If not, consider using a Fast 5 Unit (found in our 5CCL library) to fill in the gaps.

Once we have collected data, we group our students into one of four groups.

To do this, we decide if students “need support” or are “on target” for word recognition skills (phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and/or writing) and language comprehension skills (vocabulary and/or comprehension). Then, we put students into one of the following four groups based on their areas of need.

• Group A: On or Above-Level

• Group B: Needs Word Recognition Support Only

• Group C: Needs Language Comprehension Support Only

• Group D: Needs Word Recognition & Language Comprehension Support

Tools are provided on pages 5 & 6 of the intervention lesson planning guides to help you easily group students.

Knowing students’ groups will help us determine where we will focus our time with them. We still want to incorporate all 5 core components of literacy, but now we can differentiate and plan time according to students’ individual needs.

Step 4: Consider Timing & Daily Lesson Plans

When considering timing, we want to think about how frequently we will see students, and how long our lessons will last. Having a framework or lesson plan will help us to have clarity in our objectives and will also help our students to know what you want to accomplish with them during lessons.

We can use page 8 of the lesson planning guide to get ideas on how to organize our lesson blocks based on time and frequency. When writing out our actual lesson plans, we use page 7 of our intervention lesson planning guide.

Step 5: Prep Resources

Now that we know what we are going to teach, we can begin prepping resources. We use activities from our 5 Core Components of Literacy Library to instruct our students and to pull resources for our small groups (but you can use whatever activities are available to you!).

When prepping resources, we have found it helpful to organize our materials by week or lesson. Then, we color-code activities according to which core component they are addressing to make sure we are hitting them all.

For our intervention groups, we also prep materials so that they can be used multiple times. We keep our resources in page protectors so students can use dry-erase markers on them. We also prep and laminate task cards and graphic organizers and keep them somewhere where they can easily be accessed if we find our students need more support on a given task.

These 5 steps have made all of the difference in our literacy intervention!

While it takes a bit of time at the start, it has saved us so much time (and allowed our lessons to be more cohesive and effective!) in the long run.

Now, instead of trying to piece things together, we feel fully planned and prepped for the year.

Putting it all together

Click here to grab the free lesson planning guides so that you have the step-by-step lesson planning system!

Then, if you are looking for resources to use in your literacy intervention, we’d love to invite you into our 5-Core Components of Literacy Activity Library!

Inside you will access hundreds of resources to target phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, AND writing. You’ll get high-engagement resources and activities to help students generalize their skills.

Jump in now to get 50% off your first month.