First of all, holy cow! It has been about 5 weeks since I was able to do my weekly “This Week in Intervention” post. Thanks to Christmas break, some snow days, and lots and lots of assessing/data crunching, I haven’t seen kids for intervention for a full week since the second week in December. Yikes!
But this week I finally started getting back into somewhat of a routine…sort of. For the first part of the school year, I had been seeing bilingual K-2nd graders for interventions, but due to the number of students in K who qualified based upon our January assessments, I am now working with 100% Kindergarteners! I am definitely excited to work with the grade level that I am most comfortable with. I love Kinders and their enthusiasm for learning! I’m a little sad to have to “leave” my 1st and 2nd graders – but they will be in good hands and will still get extra help from bilingual reading assistants.
I’m now going to be implementing a district-developed program for Kindergarten intervention…and I have a lot of learning to do. The program is only 15 mins per kiddo, which is great for their little attention spans, but there’s a lot I have to cram into those 15 minutes. On Thursday I met with my Kinders for the first time. We started off nice and easy, by reading an alphabet book together, and I also had each child create a cover sheet for their folder, just for a little personalization and fun:
This week I also created a little checklist to help me with record keeping. I do have “official” paperwork to fill out for the program, but my schedule in the afternoon is crazy (seeing 10 total Kinders in a span of a little over 2 hours – with no time in between). So I needed something that I could use to very, very quickly mark how the kids are doing. I came up with this little half sheet checklist:
I created it around the activities included in our program, but it’s probably general enough to use with a Kinder or 1st grade guided reading group. To download, just click on the image.
This week I’ve also been hard at work on my presentation for the SDE Conference for Illinois First Grade Teachers. If you live in Illinois and teach 1st grade, come see me (and many other much more distinguished presenters) in Oak Lawn, February 23-24th.
Have a great weekend!!
I’m a first grade teacher still new at my job..