Using One Activity to Support Multiple Reading & Writing Targets
Hey there Friends!
How’s it going? Today, we wanted to share a quick tip with you on how you can take your reading intervention to the next level for students who need an extra push.
One of the most important things we’ve learned is that you can use ONE activity in a bunch of different ways to target individual student needs.
We wanted to share one specific example of how you can do this with a sentence-level reading task. For this particular example, we pulled an activity we recently completed with a student. We were doing an online lesson (‘tis the season” for having ALL online lessons) where we were targeting the AW phonogram pattern.
Orthography
His first job was to find the words that had the AW pattern and then we wanted to make sure he wasn’t just going through the motions of reading the sentence but that he was creating a visualization in his head - this supports reading comprehension!!!
Syllabication & Marking Your Words
For this particular student, we were also working on breaking words into syllables so he could read those longer words effectively.
Understanding & Identifying the Different Components of a Sentence
To create a clear visualization for reading comprehension, we need to know:
Who or what are we talking about (let’s find the subject)
What are they doing/what is happening (let’s find the predicate)
Then to bring this same sentence reading activity to the next level, we practiced identifying the “bonus” or adverbial phrase in the sentence to understand that the “bonus” (anything that wasn’t the subject or predicate) was helping us create a better visual image in our head. They were good extra details to make the sentence more “juicy” or interesting.
Sentence Expansion
When we found sentences that only had a subject and a predicate we added a text box to create an adverbial phrase that would make the sentence more descriptive. This gave the student an awesome opportunity to practice typing, practice visualization, and practice his writing skills!
We were able to use this SAME activity to practice sentence syntax and understanding of sentence structure!
In this example, he was having a difficult time identifying the subject and predicate because it was split by the “bonus phrase” so we were able to practice how you can order your sentence in different ways to create variation for a reader.
One activity can hit TONS of different target skills.
Other reading and writing skills you can target include…
Executive Functioning
When reading at the sentence level - see if the student can identify any words that they are unfamiliar with. This helps with metacognition and allows you to see if students understand what they don’t know.
Reading Fluency & Comprehension
So, yes, we know these seem pretty straightforward. However, there is a lot you can do here for fluency AND comprehension. When looking at fluency, can they read the target pattern (AW in this example) at the sentence level? Did they make any errors? Did they read to the punctuation? Were they able to read with expression and good prosody?
For comprehension - what kind of questions can they answer? We like to look at direct recall questions like - “What did the teacher ask the class to do?” but we also dig deeper into questions like, “Why do you think the class was yawning?” and “What do you think might happen next?”
Vocabulary
Sentence-level reading is a great place to incorporate vocabulary instruction into your lesson! See if students can recognize any words they don’t know, and then help them to define the words in context.
What this means for your instruction…
The amazing thing about this is that if you have a group of students with different targets and goals you can still provide the SAME activity for all of them but just ask each student to complete a task that matches his or her individual areas of need.
And the best news is - this doesn’t have to be PERFECT! Mix it up for your students and have fun with it!
Check out our Intervention Tip of the Week video below!
For a jump start your differentiation using data, be sure to grab our free Data Tracking System. This tool will help make data tracking easy and help you keep your session data organized.