Kids Reading Well Below Benchmark Need Help with Fluency, Phonics, Spelling, Vocabulary and Inferential Comprehension: Giving Kids the Help They Need through Small Groups and More

Date: Thursday, October 17, 2024

Time: 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM ET

Location: Online, via Zoom

Who Should Attend: Grades 3-8 teachers and coaches

Cost: $150 per person

There are lots of myths and misconceptions circulating about what kids in grades 3-8 need to accelerate their progress if they are reading well below benchmark. On this day, we’ll first learn Freddy Hiebert’s thoughts about what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows us about kids performing below benchmark. Specifically, the NAEP data show that about 15% of kids reading below benchmark need help with phonics, and a good deal of those kids especially need help with multisyllabic words. 

This day will help you provide support, drawing on both a spelling assessment to quickly see kids’ command of phonics and on Dr. David A. Kilpatrick’s phonological awareness screening test to ascertain if the underlying issue is a reader’s ability to isolate and manipulate sounds. You’ll learn ways to infuse phonological awareness and phonics into your workshop and also be given suggestions for decodable texts for upper grade readers. Most kids in grades 3-8 who struggle with phonics need help reading multisyllabic words, and this requires support for morphology and vocabulary as well as phonics, so you’ll receive help in supporting these dimensions as well. 

We’ll also focus on fluency. Oftentimes kids are reading so slowly that it is difficult to hold onto a literal command of what the text says. They need help building mental models as they read and doing the inference work that a text requires. Kids will benefit from an awareness of the problem and resolution in a book and from learning how to track characters’ changing feelings. Both of these are ways to help a reader understand a story across chapters. You’ll hear about ways that jotting during both independent reading and read aloud can help students with comprehension work, and you’ll explore charts and tools to support this work.

We all know that motivation to read matters, and putting compelling books into kids’ hands matters. So the day will also introduce you to some irresistible books and series–ones that you and your kids won’t want to miss and ones that will feel just right for your students who are reading below benchmark.

Across this day, expect to:

• Learn how you can draw on the data you’ve collected, as well as your deep knowledge of your students as people and as readers, to pinpoint what’s holding them back as readers and to plan for next steps.

• Familiarize yourself with the latest research on fluency instruction, and see practical ways to help children use internal punctuation and subordinate phrases as they read.

• Consider ways partners can support each other in navigating especially tricky parts of texts.

• Discuss the importance of supporting phrasal cuing with students, and consider ways this work can support both comprehension and fluency within complex texts.

• Hear about the critical importance of monitoring for meaning, and learn how you can help your students to take on the work of monitoring themselves.

• Discuss the importance of summarizing and how you can support kids as they summarize small and large parts of texts in ways that help them hold onto what’s most important.

• Understand how you can provide essential vocabulary support for students who need to bolster their own vocabularies and who need more effective strategies to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.