Five for Friday!

Happy Five for Friday!

We made it through another week! 

I'm linking up with Kacey to recap our fun:

My camera was a bit quiet this week with a schedule full of testing and meetings. Yesterday, we wrapped up our 3rd round of STEP testing and I'm thrilled with the results!

Last week, I shared our preliminary results (here). The expectation is for every student to grow three levels per school year, however, my personal goal is for my students to EXCEED those growth goals. I'm working with students at the bottom quartile (below grade level). We will have to push ourselves to close the gap and prepare for second grade.

Here's the final results:

WOOHOO! I'm very proud of my students! 

The STEP Assessment measures growth in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency (at Levels 4 and above), and comprehension. It's a comprehensive test that takes a l-o-n-g time to administer (quality time with each student!), but you cannot beat the data. 

After a quick analysis, I know where we need to focus our efforts, specifically:

Last quarter, we put our heart and soul into phonemic awareness. It's an area my students should be rockstars in because their kindergarten classrooms provide great instruction focused on rhyming, syllabication, segmentation, onset & rime...but I've noticed more and more after these assessments (even with my 3rd grade intervention group), that they still need a bit of support.

The last 6-8 weeks, we've been warming up/cooling down every single session with our phonemic awareness practice cards and I've been tracking with these progress monitoring charts. I'm so pleased with the results! 

Next school year, I'll be using this kit from the very first week:

Phonemic Awareness program - done!

Comprehension: Inferential & Critical Thinking - next project!

(Please leave a comment if you have an awesome

 product or idea to tackle this - thank you!)

We also squeezed in more hands-on fun 

this week with our sensory bins:

We had some rhyming fun with our silly friend. I'm working with a pair of students with autism and rhyming is a TRUE PLEASURE with these firsties! The more rhymes and repetition...the better! 

It doesn't have to be Dr. S's birthday to use these interactive flashcards (♥):

Here's a blogpost featured on the Ellison Education Blog explaining how easy it was to create these first-grade-friendly materials. You can read more about it here!

(There's several themes of "flashcard" diecuts  designed by Laura Kelly & I have them all...cupcakes, hot chocolate, lollipops, etc.!)

We also had a little prehistoric fun:

Did I ever mention that I  ♥ first grade? :)

Thanks for catching up! Please stop back tomorrow for Chapter 6 of our book study & the last chance to enter our iTeachFirst giveaway!

Have a super Friday! Jen