This is our first year doing mClass and although it has been a lot of work at times, I really do love it. It's been difficult to find time to progress monitor all the reds (need a lot of support) and yellows (need some support), but I can see all the growth the kiddos are making and how it is transferring to their reading and writing, so it's well worth it!
Small Group Instruction and Progress Monitoring
I think the best thing that I did this year was to invite as many parents in as possible to help me throughout my day! :) I have AMAZING parents this year who volunteer in class or work from home, and luckily, I have 2-3 parents in my room at some point every day. How does this help with mClass? Well, while I progress monitor, parents pull back the kids that are on red or yellow for a particular activity, say phoneme segmenting, and do one-on-one or small group work to provide extra help. It is such a huge help to have extra hands to provide even more assistance to small groups. I think it is always good to have the kids work with different people and have different perspectives and approaches. MClass has suggested activities complete with step by step directions that make it easy for parents to work on the exact skill the kids need. It's wonderful! They enjoy working with the kids and vice versa, and they give me great feedback about how the kids did.
To keep this organized, I split my class up into 4 groups and progress monitor/provide interventions to 7 kids each day. Of course, I may do other interventions or progress monitoring at other times, but having one set time with parents in makes life so much easier and I can rest assured that at least once a week each child is getting some one-on-one time with me to work on these skills. Many students are moving into the green (yay), so then this time can be used to provide interventions on other skills/programs, which is exciting news!
Parent Communication
I think that as always with a new program, it is important to try to educate families about what we are working on and why. Parents want to help at home and I know that if I provide them with information and tools that my kids will grow even more! I found a resource on my favorite site, Reading A to Z, to help with nonsense word assessment. I am sending this assessment home as practice, since I do all of my assessments on the mClass program on my iPad. This way parents can see exactly what their child is doing in class and will be able to practice.
Here is a picture of the note I sent home. We refer to nonsense words as Words from Mars, so this is actually really fun for kids to practice!
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Click on the picture to download this note! (Google Docs doesn't have the cute font... sorry!)
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| Click on the picture to view and download this from Reading A to Z. |
We practice reading nonsense words together according to the phonics rule we are working on that week. I have PowerPoints that we practice on the projector, as well as worksheets from a book that kids can work on independently during word work time. You can click on the pictures to go directly to my TpT page. I also posted about this on October 28 if you want to read more. :)
Resources
While blogging around, I came across this post from the Make, Take, & Teach blog, a blog full of interventions! This post has 8 great ideas for segmenting and blending sounds- I will definitely be using some of these ideas to help my kiddos!
