How do you fit it all into a 60 minute reading program?

I’ve had the best success with getting the most out of 60 minutes by having a really easy drill kind of warm-up at the beginning to get ‘em settled, and having a very predictable lesson plan (posted somewhere, too), with oral reading from a good book last, so they didn’t dawdle ‘cause they liked it. The lesson plan structure would be pretty much the same every day— drill, review, dictation, syllables/words, oral reading, so lots of the switching-gears got to be very routine.
Would there be a way to spread the AVKO out so you did some daily review but other parts of it every other day?

auditory mom,

I think you are speaking of your child’s resource class? Wasn’t this a case of the teacher not using an effective reading method? If so, I would be hopeful that the spelling will help, but the reading needs to be geared to the child’s specific needs. And if the teacher is not trained, that is a hopeless case.

Janis

What grade level is this? If the reading level is less than 4th grade, I would use all of the time for reading instruction and drop Avko spelling entirely.

An Avko lesson (especially from the first book) should not take 30 minutes in a small group setting of 3. If they are not reading at a beginning 4th grade level, they are not ready for Avko (in my opinion and experience). The time would be better spent on direct reading instruction to get them up to a beginning 4th grade level, at which point I would switch to Rewards from Sopris West for reading and Avko for spelling.

Nancy

The special ed teacher did start her on the read naturally program just this week at level 3, and my child said it was hard. It was about dinosaurs, so had a few long words in it. We discussed going to level 2.5 instead. They had read 3.0 book passages and my child was averaging 84% accuracy on 12/03 report card . On the WIAT II on 5/03 word reading 2.6 GE,pseudoword decoding 2.2GE, reading comprehension 3.4GE and spelling 2.1GE From what I read online the read naturally program takes 30 minutes. Would the read naturally program be the best bet for us. Her reading speed on the WIAT II was raw score 845,Quartile 1**, word fluency raw score 2, quartile 1 back on 5/03. There will be no time for guided reading with the AVKO spelling. If I skip the AVKO spelling maybe we can use some words from the read naturally program as her spelling list? I have a meeting with the spedial ed director at the end of this week so far not looking too good as I had mentioned they should be doing a fluency program and he said he viewed the class and they were. (Does rereading a chapter from the week before count?) Funny after his Friday viewing, the read naturally program was started on Monday but didn’t see it this Thursday I viewed and am sure it is because lack of time.

Have they completed a decoding program? You don’t work on fluency until the child has been taught the code.

84% accuracy means that they have been using an inappropriate level material for her.

Fluency practice, according to the Qualitative Reading Inventory, should be done with material at the child’s independent reading level which is 98% word recognition accuracy with 90% comprehension.

The instructional level is 90-95% with 70%+ comprehension.

The frustration level is below 90% word recognition accuracy and less than 70% comprehension. “Teachers should avoid materials at this level”.

Janis

They did Linda MoodBell in first grade and in second it was sight words and then I noticed her not moving ahead we retested and in third I started taking my child to a Spalding tutor where she is getting her decoding skills, the school used the Read Naturally program as their reading program. She did move up a full year that year but the next year they didn’t use the Read Naturallly program and she didn’t move up as much but we used different test, so hard to tell. I have my child read to me every night we are reading ” Cat Wings” right now and she is doing pretty well. I have to remind her every so often- what other sound does this letter make-she is able to decode it but takes a while. Yes, I was even wondering about going to 2.0 in read naturally or even earlier just to practice the phonems again. I have 1.8 that she did in third grade and it was doing words families. I don’t know if it will be too much to ask the school to do,but in the Spalding method they underline the phonems and number them according to sounds and maybe if my daughter did this at school maybe it would stick better with her. We’ll see what they say at my meeting with them.

I honestly do not feel that numbering the phonemes will help her to read. That is like the coding done with Saxon…there’s just not much evidence to recommend that.

The thing that I’d insist on is that Read Naturally be done at HER level. It is really not helping her to be doing a level that is much higher than she is reading.

Janis