We use the key phrase “Snow Plow” to teach this phonogram because “ow” has two sounds - /O/ like in snow, and /ow/ like in plow. Read on for teaching tips, tricks and activities!

OU has two sounds. To help our students remember these sounds, we use the key phrase “Trout Soup” because it can say /ow/ like in trout and /oo/ like in soup. The visual of fish soup is one the students don’t forget very easily! Keep reading for more tips, tricks and vowel team activities!

OO can be a tricky vowel team because it has two sounds. Click through to read about our tips & tricks for teaching this vowel team!

We use both “oi” and “oy” to make the /oi/ sound (think of the words “boy” and “foil”). When that sound comes in the middle of a word, we use “oi.” If it comes at the end of the word, we will use “oy.” Keep reading to learn more about how we teach our students all about this vowel team!

Vowel teams can be tricky for students, but we have found that teaching them in this way has made a massive difference. Keep reading for ideas for teaching the OA/OE vowel teams!

We know we are strange but absolutely LOVE data tracking and data analysis. Not joking. Part of the reason we love data is because Data Tracking & Data Analysis are the absolute best way to see how much growth our reading intervention students have made and to see where they need continued practice.

Your data is your road map, your GPS, for literacy intervention. One of the best things we can do is to get a good look at how our students are performing overall. This data will be invaluable to parents, other professionals, and next year’s teacher.

With so many ways to get long E sound, we wanted to show you how we teach the ‘ee’ and ‘ey’ vowel teams. Open to read about our approach and grab our ee/ey center activities.

Both “ai” and “ay” say the long A sound. We use “ai” in the middle of the word (think rain, pail, train, mail) and “ay” at the end of the word (play, stay, day, May).

I love to provide literacy based centers that reinforce the learning that took place during the small group time. Students rotate through a series of centers where they can work independently (or with a partner at times) to further engage with literacy experiences. 

 If you look at our Suggested Literacy Block schedule, you will note that SMARTER Intervention lends itself nicely to this type of classroom system. 

We try to progress monitor consistently to make sure students are on track with the concepts we are teaching. It is important that we are consistently spiraling back to previously instructed concepts to make sure they are getting it. Therefore, because we are already doing this it makes sense for us to create goals around mastery of words we have explicitly taught.

So data tracking is one of those necessary evils for all interventionists, special educators, speech language pathologists, teachers…we all can commiserate together.

But it’s one of those things that is just absolutely critical to determine whether or not students are growing and making progress in their intervention setting. We see students who are struggling to read and have gaps and we need to make sure those gaps are in fact closing.

So on top of all the other things we are managing in our reading intervention setting, from behavior management, to lesson introduction and skill targeting, we need to be tracking and monitoring data during our sessions.

Here are the three biggest mistakes we often see when supporting special education teams and interventionists…and no judgement here because we’ve #beenthere. Click through to read more and grab our data tracking sheets.

If you are reading this, we want to thank you for caring so much about your students. Thank you for caring enough to be curious about how you can be the best resource for them. Thank you for putting in the time and the hard-work.

One of the most “eye-opening” moments for me in intervention, was when I had a student come in and ask, “what are the other kinds of letters besides vowels and consonants?” I didn’t understand. He asked again and when I explained that those were the only two kinds of letters, he was AMAZED. I had never thought to explain this to him before because I assumed he knew that there were no other types of letters…and that was the problem.

Oh boy, targeted instruction is a big one - so buckle up because we absolutely LOVE this topic. What does it mean to provide targeted literacy instruction? Well, we are so glad you asked. As you already know by now, we are huge fans of using the literacy processing triangle basically everywhere possible. Have you seen it?

One of the things we hear over and over is that we need to be using evidence-based practices in intervention. We are told that using evidence-based intervention is critical to student success. I am suer that you have heard not to use resources that aren’t evidence based.

But what does that even mean?

Discover the key to intervention success: generalization. Learn why traditional approaches may fall short in helping students apply skills beyond sessions. Explore how connecting decoding to comprehension transforms outcomes. Uncover strategies to bridge skills and empower students for real-world reading success!

Multisensory teaching is a popular concept in research-based reading instruction, but the problem is that most teachers, interventionists, specialists (including US!) completely misunderstand what is needed to create multisensory reading and spelling instruction. We will show you the most effective and easiest way to incorporate multisensory instruction without the mess!

We’ve been there.

Planning for our students had us stressed. It had us burning out and tired. It was nothing short of exhausting, and on top of that, our students weren’t connecting with it. They weren’t growing in a way we would expect knowing how much work we were putting into it.

…and then we figured out why.