How I'm Supplementing Reading Wonders Unit 3

Now that we're back from Christmas break, we've started Unit 3 in the 1st grade Reading Wonders series. Our district requires us to use this curriculum and expects us to follow the pacing and assessments from Reading Wonders. Even though I teach special education, I am still expected to teach grade level material and use our curriculum. Although, I do go at slower pace than my gen ed counterparts.

There are things I like about the series (such as the readers and decodables from WonderWorks), but there are areas that I feel like Reading Wonders doesn't do a great job with. The practice pages are very boring and dry, but my students really need the practice!

Here are some of the materials I will use to supplement Unit 3.

At the beginning of each unit, I pull out all of the high frequency word cards for our word wall.

I love how our Word Wall is color coordinated.  This makes it easy to tell students to look for the pink card under Oo to find the word of. When students are helping their friends find words, they know to tell them what color card they should look for.

Each word card is labeled with the Unit and Week to make for easier storage and organizing. You can check them out {here} or by clicking below.

Every morning, we start our day with Corinna from Surfin' Through Second's morning work. I love how the repetition gives my students a sense of independent but also allows them practice valuable skills.

For morning work, I use the pages that are several pages behind where we are in the series. This way I know the students have been taught the skill already, and it gives them a spiral review of previously taught skills. Here's a sample page of what my students were working on before Christmas break.

You can check out Corinna's morning work by clicking {here} or the picture below.

My students love playing games! They are so excited about playing games that they don't even care that they're learning. I've made games that go along with each phonics skills and a comprehensive unit game of the high frequency sight words taught.

I use these games during small group, with my RTI intervention groups from the gen ed classrooms, as a way to reengage students when I see them slipping, or just as a quick time filler.

My students are so excited to see what the special cards are for each game. This little guy had to find out the special cards even though they weren't cut out yet!

Every game comes with a recording sheet for students to get extra practice.

You can check out the games for Unit 3 more by clicking {here} or on the picture below.

My students need a lot of practice with the weekly Wonders skills, but I also need it to be easy for me. I created these Print It! Practice It! pages to help my students AND me! I use these with the students in my classroom and the RTI students that I see from the gen ed classrooms. 

My students will do anything to use a spinner or roll dice! When students play, I typically put them in partners. Their partner is required to listen to their friend read and double check that they correctly read the word or sentence. I keep an eye on all my partners, record errors or growth as they read to each other, and help out when students have trouble decoding words.

Putting the pages in page protectors makes it easy for me to pull them out of a binder and have an easy activity ready to go at a moments notice.

Each week includes several pages of practice for decoding the weekly phonics skill, editing sentences, and practicing the grammar skills.

These are some of the pages we will be using in upcoming weeks.

Unit 3 Week 3's phonics skills focuses on the Soft C and Soft G patterns. I love the Spin It! Read It! pages that include reading phonics patterns in a sentence. 

I've really been working hard to make sure my students understand the different phonics rules that go with each pattern. I've made a point to describe the pattern and refer to the pattern and rules during our everyday talk. I love when I hear them stating the rules to each other.

Contractions are so much more fun if they can roll a dice while they're practicing!

Adding inflectional endings are so tricky! This is just the kind of practice my students need!

You can see more of the pages included in this unit by downloading the preview file that can be found {here} or by clicking the picture below.

There you have it! All this practice should really help push my students toward mastery of the skills in Unit 3!

Reading Wonders Interactive Notebook

Hi everyone! I've finally gotten a chance to blog about how I incorporated Interactive Notebooks with the 2nd grade Reading Wonders series last school year. 

Halfway through the school year, I finally felt comfortable enough with the curriculum to start implementing the Interactive Notebooks as a way for us to practice the skills. Sometimes I would use them during whole group, small group, or as an independent activity. If the week was crazy, I would sometimes not use them at all. I would pick and choose which activities to use as an Interactive Notebook depending on our schedule and my student's abilities.

First thing, I did was look at the Unit Overview for each week to see which skills I thought could be incorporated as an Interactive Notebook activity.

I decided that Work Work, Vocabulary, Comprehension, and Grammar would be good areas to use an Interactive Notebook for teaching or practice.

To get us started, I made each student a notebook and added tabs for easier organization. Having these colored tabs helped my students quickly find the area of the book that we were working in that day.

I tried two different printing options before I found the one that I liked the best for my class. I felt like printing 2 to a page made items too small for my students and settled on printing at 85%. By printing at 85%, the pages fit perfectly in a composition notebook.

I like including anchor charts for my students to use as a reference. Then if I new anchor charts up on our focus wall, they can use their Interactive Notebooks as a guide.

To help build my students' independence, I kept the weekly phonics and vocabulary activity the same. The only thing that changed was the new phonics patterns and new vocabulary words.

I made different activities to practice the skills found each week for all 4 areas.

 If you're interested in my notebooks, you can click on the pictures below. Units 2, 5 and 6 are coming shortly!

        

 I was also late posting my giveaway winner! So sorry!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Happy weekend!

Reading Wonders Curriculum in my Classroom (with freebies)

My school has recently adopted the McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders Program.  This is our first year using the program, and there has been a bit of a learning curve.  I've been using the program for the last 3 weeks and figuring out a way to best use it in my special education resource room.

It's taken some tweaking (and I'm sure I'll keep making changes throughout the year), but I have found a general routine that is semi-working.

I start each with these planning pages to help me get a good idea of what skills I'm teaching.  I feel like the pacing in the Reading Wonders program is WAY overwhelming and unrealistic (at least with my students).  I'd love to watch a lesson where they do everything in the program and stick with the time lines as suggested.

These lesson planning sheets help keep me on track and make sure I hit the major skills each week.

You can download the overview sheet from my friend Corinna at Surfin' Through Second {here} and you can read about how she's using Wonders in her classroom.  You can download my lesson planning sheet {herehttps://www.dropbox.com/s/q42mkbmghzlai5d/Wonders%20Lesson%20Plan%20Overview.pdf?dl=0}.

My school has purchased the Reading Wonders intervention program, WondersWorks.  However, I only have one interactive workbook and 8 students.  So I've been doing a lot of supplementing.  One thing I don't like about the Reading Wonders program is the lack of hands-on centers and activities.   So I've started supplemental packs for each unit to give my students more visuals and practice.

I keep my morning routine pretty similar each day.  We do the phonemic awareness activity, review our sounds, practice decoding our phonics patterns, and use our SnapWords cards to practice our sight words.

As a group, we'll do some of the center activities found in my Reading Wonders units.  This is from Unit 1 Week 3 and focuses on sorting words with blends by the short vowel sound.

I also try to throw in some kind of activity that has us work on sorting, writing, or building words.  Making Words is our favorite activity so far.  I use these folders for the word building but use the Making Words activities from my supplemental units (beginning at Unit 1 Week 3).  Doing it on the carpet was perfect since the velcro on the letters sticks.  This way none of my students lose their letters.  :)

Or we might work on some of comprehension skills for the story, such as this visualizing strategy.

I try to do at least one writing about what we have read activity each week.  My students need extra support when writing and responding, so I made these freebie reading response sheets to go with Unit 1.

You can download them as a FREEBIE by clicking on the picture below.

It did take me a bit to figure out how I was going to assess my students.  The on-level and approaching tests are just too hard for my kiddos.  I have one who can semi-do the approaching level tests but needs support to get all the way through the test.  Those tests are REALLY long!

The weekly assessment in the WondersWork program is too difficult for my students to read independently, too!  I also didn't like the questioning format of the tests.  The directions would tell students to draw a box around the words that tell them so-and-so was sad.  Or some weird direction like that.  My students can't read the text!

I decided to take the passage from the WondersWork program but redo the questions.  I retyped the questions into multiple choice and added more questions.  I read the test and questions aloud to my students and this way I can assess their listening comprehension.  I may or may not upload these for you guys depending on how I feel it's working out.

I wanted to make sure my parents understood the level their student was being assessed on.  I made this quick sheet that I attach to the students' tests.  For the student who got 8/8 questions correct, I will give him the approaching level test (with me reading it aloud to him) next week and see how he does.

Since my students are struggling readers, I also want to make sure they are mastering the sight words and phonics patterns.  I made these Quick Checks to help me assess their progress each week.

I'm working on finishing the quick checks and uploading them to my TpT store.

For small group reading, I have been using the leveled readers from the WondersWorks program.  I will say that I've had a hard time figuring out how to fit it all in.  I do need to plan better so that I get more small group and one-on-one reading time with my students.  There's so much to do for the program that it can feel very overwhelming.

If you're interested in checking out my Reading Wonders units, you can download my sample Smart Start unit as a FREEBIE by clicking on the picture below.

You can also check out my activities for Unit 1 Week 1 by clicking on the picture below.

I will be making units to supplement each week of the Reading Wonders program.  I have currently finished all the way through Unit 2 Week 3.  

I hope this gives you a glimpse of how I'm using this program in my classroom.  It's definitely been a bit of trial and error to figure out a system.  I'm still working out some kinks but starting to feel like I'm finally getting into a groove.