Wilson Supplementary Student Materials

During the school day, I teach Wilson for a group of students who are struggling with their decoding and encoding.  Wilson is a multisensory, systematic, phonics-based program.  Teachers who become certified spend several days in trainings, complete a 60 hour practicum with a struggling reader/speller, and are observed five times over the course of the year.  It is well worth the time for the wealth of knowledge you develop!

Over the years, I have created various resources to supplement the instruction.  You can also buy Wilson student workbooks from their website.  I often use these with my students, typically while charting one-on-one.   

The pack I created for Step 1 contains over 8 word searches for substeps 1.1 - 1.6.  You can find it on my TpT site!  

Local Library Sale for your Classroom

Last week I received an email saying my local library was having  sale. The email said I could fill a brown paper bag with books for $7. Obviously I was hesitant, and had very low expectations. "How good could this sale possibly be?" "Are these books even from this decade?"  Boy was I wrong!

I was on the hunt for level c -level i books, and there were a ton. I was pleasantly surprised to find so many amazing books for my students.

I also found some amazing picture books. One of my new favorites is Edwardo The Horriblest Boy in the Whole Wide World. It is a story of a boy who is always told he is horrible and then becomes more and more horrible.  You'll have to read the book to see how it turns out.  You can purchase the book here!


At the end I spent $7.50 on 44 books, that is just under 6 cents a book. I highly suggest seeing if your local library has monthly sales. I will definitely be attending next month's sale! You can find your local library sale at Book Sale Finder. This is a great website that lists book sales throughout the country!

Happy shopping,
Sara

Hopes and Dreams for a New School Year

This summer I worked as the Head Wilson teacher at the Tufts Center for Reading and Learning Research. This program is for struggling readers and many have been diagnosed with dyslexia. In the near future, I'll be sharing some of the supplemental Wilson activities I created, but today I want to share a Responsive Classroom approach for the beginning of a new school year.

Being new to the the Responsive Classroom approach, I was very excited to try out any strategies our director suggested. One of these approaches related to sharing our hopes and dreams. As this program was related to reading, our hopes for the summer were pretty specific to this content area.

I modeled that our hopes should be realistic and attainable. I went the silly route and said that being able to swim 100 miles by the end of week five was unlikely since I'd be spending my time teaching reading. I assumed I would have to provide more scaffolding for this step as I was working mostly with emerging second graders, but this was not the case. They came up with some very realistic and individualized goals for the summer. 

Here are some student examples of the template I created. There are four options available in the pack. The variations are based on font (one is specific to dyslexia) and the border (stars or bubbles). You can find them for FREE in my TPT store.

Having students reflect on their hopes for the school year also lends itself nicely to classroom conversations about expectations and how we're going to help each other meet our goals. I'll be sharing how to create a class constitution together later as well.