When elementary students struggle with reading, they should receive reading intervention lessons to help them catch up. Sometimes those reading intervention lessons take place in the classroom (with the classroom teacher), and sometimes they’re done by a reading specialist or reading interventionist, as a pull-out support.
Either way, those reading intervention minutes are precious! Reading intervention can help struggling readers get on grade level, but lessons need to be highly effective for that to happen.
In this blog post, I’ll cover 3 important tips for planning effective reading intervention in the elementary grades. I’ve provided reading intervention as a classroom teacher and a reading specialist, so I’ll share information that’s applicable for both situations!
What Activities Should Be Included in Reading Intervention in Grades K-5?
When I was a newer teacher, doing reading intervention in the classroom, I was a little confused about what, exactly, should be happening during those lessons. Should I be doing more of what I was already doing to teach students to read? Or should I be using different activities?
At that point, I hadn’t become a reading specialist yet, and I was a little lost!
The truth is, what teachers include in reading intervention time will depend entirely upon the needs of their students. You might work on things like:
- Phonological awareness
- Phonics skills (which could be as simple as letter sounds, or as complex as decoding multisyllabic words)
- High-frequency words
- Fluency
- Comprehension strategies
You don’t necessarily need to cover all literacy skills, however. Quality over quantity! Pick a couple of skills that are most essential for students’ progress, and focus on those.
And of course, you’ll always want to deliver evidence-based intervention. This could be from an evidence-based reading intervention program provided by your school, or it could be a combination of research-based strategies that you’ve put together to meet students’ needs.
If you’d like to learn how to structure effective reading intervention lessons, click here to grab my Reading Intervention Collaborative “free taste!” You’ll get a 1-hour training called “How to Structure Effective Intervention,” as well as free printable intervention activities.
Now, on to the 3 tips for planning your lessons!
Tip #1: Schedule By Skill, Not Activity
Teachers often tend to think about lessons in terms of activities. For example: first, we’ll play a game, and then we’ll read a decodable text.
Activities are important, because they allow us to provide students with guided practice, so they can develop their skills. However, it’s more effective to first think about our reading intervention lessons in terms of skills.
Skills could include things like: blending phonemes, segmenting phonemes, learning phonics patterns, decoding 1-syllable words, spelling 1-syllable words, decoding multisyllabic words, learning high frequency words, building fluency, retelling / summarizing, comprehension strategies, etc.
The whole point of reading intervention is to improve students’ skills in certain areas, right? So think “skills first,” and then find activities that align with those skills.
(On the other hand, if you think “activities first,” you run the risk of ending up with a mishmash of activities that don’t sufficiently address the high-priority skills.)
Below is an example schedule for reading intervention that builds phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. Notice how areas like “decoding” (reading words) and “encoding” (spelling words) are mentioned.
There are many activities that can be used to provide practice in each of the skill areas. For example, encoding practice might be building words with magnetic letters, spelling words on whiteboards, or doing a written sort.
But by scheduling the skill first, you know that you will be addressing spelling, regardless of what that actually looks like. This helps you stay focused on what matters most (the skills).
Below is an example schedule for reading intervention that focuses on comprehension, with some additional vocabulary instruction.
To hear me talk through both of these example schedules and give more detail, don’t forget to grab my Reading Intervention Collaborative “free taste!”
Tip #2: Clearly Map Out the Gradual Release of Responsibility for Skill Instruction
One advantage of doing reading intervention in small groups is that you can better customize scaffolding and support to meet students’ needs.
For example, when you’re teaching a phonics skill to the entire class, you may get through it in a couple of days, and most students will have learned the skill fairly well.
But your below-level students may need more support and time to master that skill. And it’s much easier to provide that when you’re working with a smaller group of students in reading intervention.
The gradual release of responsibility, which is an important part of explicit, systematic instruction, begins with giving students lots of help. Then, you slowly remove that help until they can practice a skill independently.
For example, if students are learning the “ay” vowel team, you might start by introducing the pattern and modeling how to read words with “ay.” Then, you have students read a list of “ay” words. Next, you have students spell a few “ay” words (after you model 1-2 examples). Last, students read sentences with “ay” words.
The next day, you increase the difficulty level. You review the “ay” vowel team as well as the “ai” vowel team (which you have taught previously, in this example). Students read a list of words, some with “ai” and some with “ay.” They spell words with “ay” and “ai” and, in doing so, practice choosing between the two vowel teams. Students read a decodable text with “ay” and “ai” words, too.
The following day, you increase the difficulty level again. Students are asked to read words with “ai,” “ay,” and short a. They spell words with these patterns. They reread the decodable text to build fluency.
This is just one example, of course! To hear me talk through another example, make sure to download my Reading Intervention Collaborative “free taste.”
When you’re planning for the gradual release of responsibility, it’s also important to be adaptable. Just because you have a great plan does not mean that the plan is actually going to work!
I’m an experienced reading specialist and am constantly revising my plans – which is a good thing. Sometimes I’ll notice that students are picking up a skill more quickly than I anticipated. Or they’re just not getting it, and I need to spend more time on something.
Being flexible and willing to change your plans is important in all aspects of teaching, but especially in reading intervention, because you want to customize your instruction to meet students’ specific needs. That will help students make the most growth possible!
Tip #3: Make Sure You’re Gathering the Right Data
Because time for reading intervention is always limited, it’s important to be clear on what your students’ strengths and weaknesses are. This helps you decide what to focus on during your intervention lessons (and determine which students need interventions in the first place).
In many schools, teachers end up with a mountain of data. You may have data from benchmarking and screeners, plus progress monitoring data (which allows you to track student progress to see how they’re responding to interventions) – not to mention other formative and summative assessments from classroom instruction.
But unfortunately, you don’t always end up with the right data.
For example, a student in reading intervention might receive biweekly progress monitoring assessments to track their oral reading fluency (words read correctly per minute).
This is helpful data, but there are so many different reasons why a student might struggle with fluency!
Is it because they have gaps in their phonics knowledge? If so, which specific skills haven’t they mastered? And/or are they struggling to decode multisyllabic words? Or maybe they’re not recognizing high frequency words automatically? If so, which ones? Or are they just not reading quickly enough in general?
As you can see, in this example, just knowing how many words a child reads in 1 minute isn’t enough information to drive your instruction. More specific diagnostic assessments are needed to gather this data.
And, yes, giving more assessments does take time. But it’s time well-spent, so that you can make the most of your precious minutes in reading intervention.
Members of my Reading Intervention Collaborative get access to tons of quick, easy-to-give assessments to make it easy to stay on top of their students’ progress!
For example, they get access to 186 word reading lists like these:
To get a free sample of the Reading Intervention Collaborative materials, click here!
Next Steps
Whether you’re a classroom teacher, interventionist, or some other kind of specialist – planning effective reading intervention lessons is key to ensuring students will become skilled readers. Even if you have a reading intervention program to follow, you still need to be knowledgeable enough to adapt it to meet the specific needs of the students in front of you.
If you want to become an expert in instructional strategies for reading intervention, check out my Reading Intervention Collaborative membership!
I created the RIC because I know how essential it is for ALL teachers to understand how to get struggling students on grade level. Our below-level readers are counting on us.
Start with a free sample of the RIC materials by clicking here!
Happy teaching!
