When we discussed this statistic with the team - it got heated. If you know us at all, then you know that we believe every child deserves success and the fact that two-thirds of them are not able to access grade-level materials is gut-wrenching. We did some digging and realized that the reason that 66% of 4th-grade students are not reading at grade level is that…

When we are trying to determine which areas we should focus on with our students we are using our data to provide a guide, a roadmap.

But one of the biggest mistakes we see (we know because we’ve been there) is that we aren’t using data to drive decisions because of two big blocks.

While 2020 was an interesting year to say the least, we were glad to have learned so many lessons. One of which, was how to stay organized in a completely digital space. We transitioned lessons to a completely digital format, student interaction, you name it! And with all the changes, we realized Tracking data digitally was another great way to communicate students’ growth and what was happening in our sessions with our students’ parents and with our colleagues. Today, we wanted to walk you through how we track our literacy data in a digital format!

One of the most common questions we have been getting is how to open a PowerPoint in Google Slides. Many schools use Google platforms for their online classrooms, but not everyone is familiar with how to use Google with lessons that originate in a different format! We’ve broken it down to a few easy steps you can follow to open any of your lessons in Google Slides!

This is a bold claim - we understand. But here’s the thing we’ve noticed after years of intervention work and years of working with hundreds of literacy interventionists.

The culture of literacy intervention has built up this idea that we have to be perfect to get started. This idea that if we don’t do everything just so …. our students will suffer. It’s led to this idea that there is a “perfect way” to implement effective literacy intervention.

Whenever we talk about literacy, we always come back to this literacy processing triangle. Now, many reading intervention programs do a nice job of connecting the bottom points of the triangle by working on the orthography to phonology connection. Much less frequently, we see the third point, semantics, tied into a program

As more and more barriers are put up in education, it makes it harder for our kids to get the help that they need. We want to encourage you to make reading intervention simple. If we overcomplicate things it is only making it harder for our students to access, for us to deliver, and for students to get what they need. It doesn’t have to be hard. Let it be easy! Click through to find out the ACTUAL approach that will make literacy intervention effective for your students and easier for you!

How’s it going? Hopefully you’re hanging in there with all the craziness going on in the world recently. 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 in our intervention time is that you can use ONE activity in a bunch of different ways to target individual student needs and to uplevel your intervention.

For our intervention tip of the week, we wanted to make sure to bring you all something really valuable and actionable because we know how hard this can be right now to figure out how to keep your students engaged! In our small group and 1:1 sessions - we’re trying to leverage interactive games as much as possible.

“Teletherapy,” “online learning,” and “online teaching resources” are just a few of the terms that have been buzzing around the last few days as schools and practices all over the nation have moved to an online space. Today, we wanted to share with you how we teach reading online, and our 3 favorite resources to make it the most effective!

One of the most important things you can do for your students is to make sure to have a solid outline for what you will be covering and the order in which you will be covering these patterns.

This ensures that they are getting ALL the skills they need and that they can get used to the lesson format and structure - goodbye negative behaviors!

Today, we wanted to share with you our tip on planning out your intervention lessons. We use a curriculum map that helps to outline the target skills we want to make sure we are hitting in each of our lessons.

Today we wanted to talk about the best way to group students together for your reading intervention groups.

In this quick intervention tip of the week we talk about how important it is to ….

When students are struggling - it’s hard to know where to start and what the most important steps are in providing support to get them to where they need to be.

After working with hundreds of students, and evaluating thousands of students, we’ve realized that the most important thing that parents and educators can do to support struggling students actually has nothing to do with intervention or tutoring, accommodations, modifications, IEP or 504 Plans…

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!

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.

So this can be one of the most challenging things we face as reading interventionists - what activities do I pull to target specific weaknesses for my struggling readers? And how can I do that without spending a TON of extra time that I don’t really have?

We all want the very best for our students, it’s our mission and our goal to be providing the best possible instruction to help completely eliminate reading and spelling gaps.