Pathways to Reading Flexday- Kelly Anderson
As a special education teacher, I have always wanted to use Pathways to Reading with my students. The majority of my students were not developmentally ready for the Pathways instruction they received in the primary grades. They needed small group, intensive instruction at their instructional level. I had tried to implement the program with borrowed manuals and pieced together kits, but lacked the training needed to fully understand the program, it's organization, and components.
In August 2015, I was able to participate in a 5 day training on the Pathways to Reading program, led by Terry Clinefelter.
Vowel Practice- in the beginning, we built Vowel Town together. We used the "What's Your Name E " game to distinguish long and short vowel sounds and spellings.
Students worked together to practice the vowels from Vowel Town with Vowel Rivers.
Here, one of my lower achieving students is listening to a partner and pointing out a mistake. He is motivated by playing this coach role, and pays close attention to determine if he agrees or disagrees with the sounds his partner reads.
In this photo, students are practicing Vowel Rivers independently, while I work with students who need re-teaching.
I created data sheets in the Numbers App to record Vowel Rivers and the other vowel activities as formative assessments. This made it very quick and easy to monitor progress during practice activities.
All of my students made significant gains from August to November in their pre and post Spell a Sound assessments.
They are on their way to becoming confident readers!
I gave the Spell a Sound pre-test on 8/18/15 and again as a post test on1 1/20/15. Student 1 went from a raw score of 17 to 37, a 38% increase. Student 2 went from a raw score of 26 to 40, a 27% increase. Student 3 went from a raw score of 31 to 49, a 34% increase. I will analyze errors on the Spell a Sound post test for each student in order to provide more instruction and practice in their individual areas of weakness.