Assessing Sight Word Fluency

Your iPad is your best friend when it comes to testing for students' sight word fluency!  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  

I do my best to formally assess each student on his/her sight word recall (using the Pre-Primer and Primer Dolch word lists) once a month, beginning with the first week of school.  I assess students again on these same words around the end of September, and then a third time around Halloween.  Historically by this point, all students but one or two will be able to demonstrate mastery with 100% accuracy in this area. Because these two lists are words that should have been learned and mastered in kindergarten, many students will show me that they know all the words during my first or second assessment.  (Whew!  I love it when this happens, because this means more of my time can be spent with small groups instead of assessing one-on-one.)  As soon as a student is able to recite an entire word list with 100% accuracy, I snip the corner off that student's assessment sheet so I can easily see that they do not need to be assessed in that area again. 

Which brings me to my Fluency Assessment Binder: 

I use a set of Avery binder dividers, numbered 1-31.  These, I'm sure, were intended to be used for each day of the month, however they work perfectly in my Fluency Assessment Binder (or any other binder requiring a tab for each student).  Students are assigned a number at the beginning of the year, and I file students' reading assessment data in this binder under their numbered tab.  This allows me to re-use the same dividers year after year (those suckers were expensive), and I don't need to spend the time meticulously printing beautiful and neat labels with each student's name on each tab.  EASY PEASY, right?  

Full-disclosure: if you have a class of students that numbers more than 31, as I did last year, you will not have a tab for each student.  I think Avery makes tabs that go up to higher numbers, but a trip to Staples to investigate at the start of the year just didn't happen.  And then I decided there were just too many other things to worry about than making sure the last four students at the end of the alphabet had an individual tab in my assessment binder.  So, if you find yourself in the same position as me last year, do what I did: paper clip the groups of papers for students numbered 31 through 35, and stick them at the end of the binder with no tab at all.  Surprisingly, this hackneyed system of separating papers worked just fine.  Now this year I'm back to a class of only 26 students, and all is well again with the world.  

I copied enough sheets of the Sight Word Fluency Checklists to place one behind each student's number tab in my binder.  There are three columns, for each possible assessment date during the first trimester.  (As I mentioned before, some students will not need to be assessed more than once, if they can read all words during the first assessment.)  If, after three assessments however, a student has still not mastered his sight words, simply make a second copy of the Sight Word Fluency Checklist, and place it in your Fluency Assessment Binder in front of the first copy.  Continue to do this, assessing about once a month, until the student is able to show mastery of all required words.  

Here's where the iPad comes in!  (Side note: You can do all of this with a lap top computer, or even in front of a desktop computer.  I just like the flexibility of the iPad, which allows you to find a quiet spot anywhere.)  I believe that all iPads can now download for free the apps for Pages, Numbers, and (the app I use during Fluency Assessments) Keynote.  Keynote is just Apple's version of PowerPoint, and while it took me a minute or two to get the hang of it, it is actually pretty simple to use.  

I used the Keynote app to create a slideshow of the Dolch Sight Words Pre-Primer list (and later, additional slideshows for each subsequent Dolch List).  Simply type one word on each slide, (making sure to use the same word order that you have on your checklist).  If you are creating your own checklist, do NOT list the words in alphabetical order.  Students need to see these words in a random order, out of context, and still be able to read them correctly.  

Find a quiet place for you and your student to sit, and then set the slideshow to run, with a three-second delay between transitions to the new slide (sight word).   All you need is your iPad, (either propped up where the student can see, or in the student's lap), and a clipboard, pencil, and that student's Fluency Checklist.  Once the slide show begins to play, the student only has a few seconds to answer before the slide show moves on to the next slide/word.  Everything is automated through the iPad, and therefore everyone gets a completely fair and objective assessment.  Each student is guaranteed to receive the same amount of time per word as everyone else.  (Plus, I've found there are fewer comments from the students such as, "Slow down, you're going too fast!" or, "Go back, I missed one!")  The only thing your student needs to do is say the words aloud as he/she is able to read them, and your only job is to either place a check mark next to a word to show that it was read correctly, or leave the box blank, to indicate that no response was given.  I will write in the box whatever word (or beginning sound) the child does say, however, as these extra notes can often help me guide instruction in reading groups.  

And that's it!

New Year, New Hobbies!

As I've written in a previous post, I've taken up the piano!  But I've also recently rekindled an old hobby of mine as well: art!  Except this time, instead of using traditional paper and pencil, I've been using the Paper by 53 app on my iPad, and the corresponding Pencil stylus . . . so I guess I'm still using Paper and Pencil!  Painting on the iPad has taken a little practice, but I'm starting to get the hang of it! I'd forgotten how relaxing it is to just sit and draw or paint for an hour or so. 

My favorite part of this app is the watercolor feature.  I love that when you hold the stylus (or your finger) on the screen, the color will pool in a very realistic way, creating a fine, slightly darker ring of color along the edges.   For the painting of the trees above, I used the watercolor feature, as well as the marker, colored pencil, and pen.  

I want to brainstorm ideas on how I might utilize something like this in the classroom during our art lessons.  I can't afford to buy my kiddos $60 styluses (they'd have to use their fingers),  but I think it would be fun to see the kinds of things my students could create with something like this.  

And I just realized what the best part would be of using this in the classroom: zero clean up!  No paint brushes to clean, no water cups to dump out, no stained shirts, no spills!  Don't get me wrong, I know there is a definite need for the tactile messiness of hands-on art projects.  But this would be a cool addition to all of that too, don't you think?  Hmm, but then I'll have to use a fortune's worth of color cartridges to print their work . . . Sounds like a possible Donors Choose proposal?  Something to think about . . .

What do you think?  Have any of you other blog readers used their iPads for art in the classroom?  I'd love to hear your comments!

Creating a Listening Center with an iPad

If you have an iPad in the classroom, you can create a listening center for your students to listen to read along books.    The trick is to buy a headphone splitter, which will allow up to five students to plug their headphones into one iPad.  You can even plug a second headphone splitter into one of the headphone jacks of the first, adding another four headphone jacks to your initial five.  I ordered mine on Amazon for about ten dollars - highly worth it, considering it just multiplied my iPad usability by five.  

Where before only one student was using an iPad to listen to a book on CD, now I have five students utilizing a single iPad. Even if you have a set of multiple iPads for your classroom, this still frees up iPads for other students to use at a different center. 

I've found a bunch of books with read along CD at the Dollar Tree last year, and all I did was put the CD in my computer to download it onto iTunes (I created a Read Along playlist just for books on CD), and then transferred my iTunes playlist onto my iPad the next time I synced up.  The kids know to go to Music on the iPad, and then look for the book title they're reading.  

Another fantastic feature of using the iPad as a Listening Center, is that you only need ONE copy of the read along CD.  Once you've put the music file on your computer, you can put it on all of your class iPads. 

Since there's five kids on one iPad, I did have to coach the kids on waiting until everyone had their headphones on, and their books open and ready before the group leader pressed Play on the iPad.   (I learned this lesson very quickly, after several students started crying that the rest of the group had started the book before they were ready.)

There are a few books with CD at Scholastic Book Clubs this month that I'm thinking about ordering... Now that I've nailed down my system for Listening Centers, I'm eager to start building my Read Along library!

What about you, readers?  How do you work listening to reading into your day?

Favorite iPad Apps: Bluster

Another one of my favorite iPad apps, Bluster!  This app is FREE, and it has three different levels of difficulty, which is fantastic because I have a huge range of ability in my class this year.  But word to the wise: turn the volume down, because otherwise you will have the computerized sound of thundering clouds and rain roaring through your classroom.  

Irregular Plural Nouns

We've been doing some review work on irregular plural nouns. When I covered this earlier, a few of my kids were still a liittttlle shaky on the whole concept of nouns (compared to verbs and adjectives), so I decided to touch on it again. This is a writing activity we did last month in our writing journals:

This was enough for the majority of the class to "get it," especially after writing sentences that used irregular plural nouns.  But to let my stragglers catch up to the pack, I did this activity:

I had a list of 28 nouns one for each student, with several nouns for each of the following singular-to-plural rules: 

~add -s, 

~add -es, 

~change y to i and add -es, 

~change f to v and add -es, and 

~keep the plural noun the same as the singular. 

I then drew name sticks to assign students to a word, and they had to draw and label the singular noun on one side of the page, and draw and label the plural noun on the other half of the page, using the appropriate rule.  

The best part of this activity came the following morning during reading centers, when the kids had to sort each other's labeled drawings according to the rule they used to make the noun plural.  They recognized each other's work, and loved using their own work to do the sort. I guess there are situations where my beautifully crafted and laminated flash cards aren't the best way for kids to learn!  (While my ego took a slight blow, I realized that it's a lot less work for me if the kids make their own sorting cards for grammar and spelling conventions.)

To really drive the concept of irregular plural nouns home, I assigned this app in one of my iPad centers. In this free app, the kids are given a sentence that uses an irregular plural noun, except they have to decide what form of the noun should be used. For example, "The boy saw three ______ in the forest."  Then the students have to drag either the word deer or the word deers into the blank. 

I love the Phonto iPad app!

One of my new favorite iPad apps is a (free!) photo-editing app called Phonto.  It lets you write text over photos, in a bunch of different colors and fonts.  This app will also let you put a background color behind the words (like I did in white), and rotate the words (like I did on the second photo, along the left-hand side).  I had some fun practicing Phonto's options by writing labels all over some pictures of my classroom.  

I'm still looking for a good photo collage app though... I've tried a few but haven't liked any of them that much so far.  I just downloaded Pic Collage, but I'm not in love with it.  It's difficult to zoom/resize the images once you put them in the squares.  But don't worry, followers!  You'll be the first to hear when I find the one that works for me!