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| Carly providing a tutoring intervention with a Reading Corps Student |
During a recent graph review meeting, our Master Coach and Internal Coach at Loess Hills decided that it would be beneficial for our 1st graders to switch to the Blending Words intervention which combines the conjunction aspect of Phoneme Blending/Segmenting with the visualization of the words on the page. Many of my 1st graders had repeatedly tried to peek into my packet while we were practicing and it seemed to aid in their understanding of how the sounds correlated to the letters and how those letter sounds blended into a word.
The following progress monitoring assessments confirmed that Blending Words was a more successful intervention for nearly all of the students, and one of my students made an unbelievable jump. Mark* is a 1st grader who took a long time to warm up to me, often half-listening or staring into space during our sessions. After a few weeks, he began to open up socially but his scores and understanding of letter sounds remained lower than expected. However, after switching to the Blending Words intervention, Mark’s score went from 16 sounds the previous week to 58 sounds. The visualization of the letter accompanied with the blending format helped to reestablish his understanding of letter sounds, and though I knew he had been doing well in the
intervention since the switch, I had no idea that he would accomplish so much.
I explained to Mark that his progress was downright astounding and that I was beyond proud. I gave him a ticket (a motivational reward used in the PBIS program at Loess Hills) and told him to tell his teacher how wonderfully he'd performed on his test. He looked at me, bewildered by what I was trying to tell him, but I think receiving the ticket got the point across. I’m looking forward to the next progress monitoring to see if he can repeat his previous performance, or perhaps (fingers crossed!) improve upon it.
*Name changed to protect confidentiality.
