These are several interventions or teaching strategies I would suggest for my colleagues after viewing the results.
Fluency
1. Read to a partner- This practice enables students to practice reading stories aloud without the fear of reading in front of the entire class.
2. Read in front of the class- Not always a favorite among students, but also reinforces the ability to practice saying words from a story out loud. Some examples of this would be reading what they have written, Reader's Theater, or reading poems.
3. Teacher modeling- It's always very important that teachers continue to practice fluency in front of their students. Students need to see how stories should be read, where to pause, and how important punctuation is during a story.
Comprehension
1. Review the five W's: who, what, when, where, why. Using a graphic organizer can help students organize their thoughts after reading a story. Click on the link to a great site for graphic organizers.
2. Students create questions from the story that could appear on their weekly tests.
3. The teacher should focus on creating a deeper pool of background knowledge to help students understand the story more clearly, like having students fill out a K-W-L chart.
4. Using self to text connections, world to text connections, and text to text connections when reading the story. This strategy creates more meaning to the student if he can create a personal connection with the story.
Vocabulary
1. Create a word wall students can refer back to through the year.
2. Play Vocabulary Bingo. Students have cards with the words and the teacher will say the definition.
3. Play Hangman using vocabulary words.
jc-schools.net/tutorials/PPT-games is a great website with ready made games.
4. Creating pictures that define the vocabulary words, along with a sentence and a student-created sentence using the word correctly.
5. Semantic maps are useful in tying together new vocabulary with prior knowledge and related terms.
Writing
It is my recommendation that these students are taught how to organize their ideas, plan their stories, then be taught how to execute the idea on paper. The students lacked the knowledge on how to write a story. They struggled with coming up with an idea. It is obvious that writing has not been taught in fourth grade.
* One thing I think would help both comprehension and fluency is to answer questions right after reading a short passage or tell everything you know about that passage to a partner. This encourages the reader to be conscious of what is being read instead of just focusing on the words.
IStation
A typical IStation teacher intervention lesson.
The computer generates lessons for students based on cycles. Each cycle has a skill matched up with a student. The lessons are easier in the year and become more difficult as the year progresses.
In April, overall Reading scores continue to get better, but students still struggle with comprehension. Overall, Tier 3 decreased by 4% but Tier 2 increased by 23%. I suspect the test IStation recently gave was more difficult which resulted in the drop of scores. Spring break also took place through the week of the 25th, so I blame some scores on spring fever.
Results:
Comprehension
Overall Reading
Text Fluency
Vocabulary