Working on reading and math interventions

Things have gotten underway in my new job. I'm doing small group interventions for reading and math at a rural charter school. The whole school is only about 55 or 60 kids, and my groups are all four or fewer students at a time. The challenge (for now) is streamlining my curriculum. I'm working with five different levels for reading, and using as many different programs! There's a fair amount of prep involved on the front end to get this all figured out, but I feel like I have something coherent and relevant for each group now. The littlest ones are using Touch Phonics to review and incorporate some remedial phonics skills. The next level is using a Sight Words and Syllabication system. The next two levels of intermediate students are reading short high interest nonfiction passages and being tested for comprehension. I think I'll soon be adding Dolch word drills to their work as well. And with the oldest students we're timing their reading speed on short passages, repeating three times per passage, and charting the results on nice little graphs. They seem pleased in spite of themselves to see the improvements they make each time.

This is all a great learning experience for me. I have to deal with such a huge age range (7 to 13) that my classroom management skills are tested daily. But I'm loving the challenge and as I get to know the kids I think I'm doing a better and better job. Tomorrow is an inservice day and they're sending me to a training for Renaissance Learning. I'm looking forward to it because their systems are widely used in our local districts and it will be good to know better how to use them, and because I think the Accelerated Math component could be useful for interventions. Plus it will be nice to sit and learn in that format for a day.

All in all it's going well.