Week 2 Activity - Identify Students

Upon arriving at my school this year, I was informed of a situation with the second grade class. During the previous year their teacher had numerous personal and medical issues that caused her to be out of the classroom the majority of the year. Since many of these were separate yet extended occurrences, the students had 5 different subs through out the year for varying lengths of time.

After performing the Beginning of the Year Benchmark for DIBELS, 10 out of 20 students were classified as Intensive and 3 more were classified as Strategic. Three of the Intensive students have IEPs and are working with the Special Ed teacher. I have been working with the remaining 10 students since the beginning of the year. 

Once I began working with these students, I administered the Phonics Screener for Intervention from the 95% Group. This test is broken down by phonics skills, CVC, blends, digraphs, long vowel silent-e, etc. and students are given 10 nonsense words and 10 real words within 2 sentences per skill for a possible combined score of 20. An ideal score would be 17 or higher. As DIBELS showed only 7 students were able to score 17 for CVC skills, 3 for blends, 2 for digraphs, and only 1 student was able to score 17 for long vowel silent-e. Students entering second grade should have a solid understanding of each of these skills plus some knowledge vowel teams. Over half the class, was unable to blend letter sounds to decode a word. 

During the first week of December our district opened the Middle of the Year Benchmark window for DIBELS. During this testing, the number of students in each category stayed the same but we had one Strategic move to Core and one Core move to Strategic. We also had one Intensive move to Strategic and vice versa. The students are finally able to read a book independently and many of the students have made huge strides but as they progress so does the rigor and goals of the testing. 

I will be using the survey for the entire class and the teaching methods with the 10 students I am working with for 30 minutes daily in 2 small groups. Within a week or two I will also be tutoring these students in even smaller groups and some one-on-one in the afternoons. 

I used the Professor Garfield Elementary Reading Attitude Survey on my small groups and will administer the survey to the remainder of the class this coming week. This will allow me to compare the results of struggling readers with non struggling readers. I also plan to re-administer the survey at the end of the year to see if scores increase as their reading ability improves. 

Group 1 

Student 1

Student 7

Student 8

Student 14

Student 15

Group 2

Student 2

Student 6

Student 10

Student 17

Student 20