The favorite part of my day is when I get to meet with my students in small groups. It’s really a time where we get to connect, and I can see their strengths shine through. It took me a lot of trial and error to find the grouping style that worked best for me and my students. This method has led to me having the highest growth in reading in my school for the past two years.
Grouping Students
We use NWEA MAP to monitor our students’ growth throughout the year. I actually really like this test as I feel like it gives me a lot of really good data on what exactly my students need. I use the Learning Continuum, and look at the skill strand each individual student is the lowest in, to determine if students need more practice in informational or literary texts. This information determines the group they are placed into.
Now, this is the part where teacher judgment comes in: there are some students who need explicit instruction in decoding and the use of decodable texts. This takes priority over the Learning Continuum as I want them to be able to access the text first before we practice reading strategies more heavily. With decodables, I typically just focus on summarizing what they have read and improving their fluency.
For students who are fluent readers, I focus more on the specific reading skills that NWEA says they need practice with. I try to find texts that are related to what we are learning in our current reading unit so that there is continuity in what my students are learning/practicing. This allows me to build their background knowledge even further and work with them on domain-specific vocabulary and higher-level phonics.
Materials
I gather my materials from a variety of different places. I really enjoy using Florida Center for Reading Research because their materials are high quality and are sorted by the five reading pillars. It’s a great one stop shop for meeting the needs of all my students.
A resource I have really come to love for my emerging readers is SPIRE. It’s not a free resource like FCRR is, but if you are able to get admin to pay for it, I highly recommend it. I have seen AMAZING growth using this program. I have several students who grew 13 points on their reading MAP test just from fall to winter! It is truly amazing to see their confidence and love of reading grow in such a short amount of time.
For my more proficient readers, I will use the books from Benchmark or do a novel study with them. One of my groups just finished Hidden Figures and really enjoyed learning all about the history of “computers” and the wonderful women behind the launch of an astronaut into orbit.
It’s really a time where we get to connect, and I can see their strengths shine through.
This is just a small glimpse into my small group time, but I hope it has inspired you in some way! I truly believe that this is one of the most important times of the day as it is when you are able to meet each student’s individual needs.
The Blissful Teacher 