Veteran's Day - Wednesday - No School
This past Thursday evening I attended a Veteran's Day service at Wheaton College given by the ROTC. The service reminded all of us how much we owe our freedoms to those who fight to preserve them for us. I would like to thank all of you who are veterans or who are currently in the military. Thank you for your service to our country. Thank you for protecting us. Thank you for laying your lives on the line so that we can continue to enjoy all the benefits of being citizens of the United States of America.
Another Intervention for RTI - Wilson
This week I would like to describe another intervention that we use at Prairieview for RTI. It is called Wilson. It is a system of teaching reading created by Barbara Wilson. Methodically, the students learn the six syllables types. They learn how to break longer words into syllables in order to decode them quickly and easily. There are specific methods to help students learn sight words; words that do not exactly follow the decoding rules. There is vocabulary instruction. Students are taught to read in phrases, instead of word-by-word. They are taught to make pictures in their mind of what they are reading and then put the pictures together in the correct order to make a movie. This helps their comprehension. Wilson is a research based intervention that works on all five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
Helping your Child with Fluency
One method you can use to help your child with fluency is called "echo reading." Read one sentence very fluently while your child listens. Ask your child to try to read the sentence the same way you read it. Then do the same thing on the next sentence. After you practice that for several days, ask your child to read a sentence silently to himself and figure out how to read the sentence so that it sounds best. Then have him read it outloud to you. Have him work on reading phrase-by-phrase instead of word-by-word.
