I am constantly Googling things like “sight word interventions” and “letter recognition strategies” to see if anything new is popping up. In addition, by the time children are sitting at my table their teachers have already emptied their own bag of tricks into the student for 6-12 weeks.
That’s a lot of tricks, y’all!
I’m also a big advocate for doing kinesthetic interventions whenever possible. Little people need to move things around! But manipulating the same set of magnets around every Monday is getting a little old! 🙂
Recently, I discovered a new tool that brought life back into some of our “routine” interventions. They are super easy to pull out, with little/no mess involved. They claim to dry in 90 seconds, but it really never took longer than 30! 🙂
When The Pencil Grip contacted me about doing a review for these, I was a little hesitant. I didn’t quite know how I would use these with my intervention students. But really, these arrived just in time. We have been having a blast! 🙂 (Click the picture above to see them on their site!)
My youngest friend has had the best time completing his letter recognition pages with PAINT! Every Monday, I have him complete a visual discrimination page that I make based on the errors from his letter recognition probe on Friday. He’s really been struggling with b/d and c/s so that’s what this week’s page reflected.
After a couple of weeks of watching J get a little “marker happy” when he was identifying letters, I brought out the transparent color chips. The extra practice has been really good for him, and it gives us a chance to discuss any errors before they are “set” on his paper.
Finally, we go back with the Kwik Stix and circle/underline/color them.The Kwik Stix are a bit “fat” and it can be hard for my littlest friends to manipulate them, but they get the hang of it pretty quickly!
I’ve also used them to “freshen up” another strategy I like to use with a few kiddos who are working on their sight words. Our special ed administrator shared this strategy with me and my kids LOVE it!
I take a piece of plastic embroidery canvas and cut it into 3-4 inch strips. We place it underneath a piece of paper and draw from a pile of 5-6 unknown sight words. Today I had a few I knew I wanted L to work on, so I wrote those in highlighter first.
Then, I have the student write it in LARGE print in pencil first and say it. then again with a Kwik Stix. Finally, because the Kwik Stix dries so quickly, I have the student trace over it with their fingers. We say it out loud every time we write or trace over it.
If you’d like to try any of these strategies out in your own room, consider using the affiliate links below to grab them for yourselves!
I like your idea. But what I am most interested in is the form you are using to do RTI. It is personalized to the learner. Where did you get that?