UFLI Foundations is a wonderful program. We used it for reading intervention and ESL. For the younger students, we folded the page in half and glued the decodables into the notebooks so they could read, re-read, and interact with the page.
This gave us extra space to write on and adapted a few techniques for the students that needed extra support and practice.
1. Comprehension = Who & What
The goal of reading intervention is for the student to learn to read. However, the testing was showing the students had little or no comprehension and could not advance to the next level. So, we adapted a few things. Before the student could illustrate the story, they needed to list the who and the what topics in the story.
For this story, the who was Dad, Kip, and the pup. The what was the disk, mud, and the tub. After the student has read the story, they need to write the keyword on the line. Then they can draw what was in the story.
We needed to make these changes because some students wanted to draw rainbows and princesses for every story. Labeling first gave us a chance to write the words that were in the story and reflect on who and what the story was about.
2. Print Awareness Drop Down Letters
Some students struggle with tall, small, and fall letters.
Some of the students struggle to see the visual difference between d, b, & p. This print awareness skill is more than just randomly circling the letter p like a Savonjour hunt. This technique teaches the student to start at the beginning of the sentence and trace under the letters to find the letter that drops below the line. Then loop around to circle them without lifting the pencil. This is called eye-tracking. The student is visually scanning the text line the same way they would read it. This builds the left-to-right habit that is needed for decoding and encoding.
The continuous line mimics how the finger would follow under the words as the student reads and how eye tracking should follow the letters and not jump around on the page.
For this lesson #22, letter K was our focus letter, but not the letter used for the print awareness drill. Lowercase letter /p/ was the letter that the students needed to practice based on the struggles they had with reading and decoding. Teaching is flexible practice. Small adjustments can be made tailored to the students’ needs in the moment.
Fold the Page & Glue Only Half Down
Notebooks start to get full quickly. The printed decodable stories are great for reading and more. Folding the page before it is added to the notebook helps save space for more writing.
Folding creates space on the page and on the back of the folded area as well.
This routine of folding the page saved us a lot of space in our notebooks. Instead of using two pages for every lesson, we were able to use only one page per lesson.
Under this flap can be spelling words, sentences, irregular words or handwriting practice.
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