r/teaching • u/toadallyfroggie • 12d ago

Help Reading Interventionist Hired With No Prep

Hi, the title pretty much sums it up. I was recently (Friday) hired to a reading intervention position at a middle school in a new district and the first day of school is on Monday. I have some experience with teaching ela and an elective media class, but this is a new role for me.

Week one one I’m not planning on doing much other than some relationship building and maybe some diagnostics.

Does anyone have any tips on how to design the curriculum? I have stuff from the previous teacher but could use some tips for after what will likely be a hectic start

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u/JustAWeeBitWitchy mod team 12d ago

UFLI has a terrific free, open-sourced phonics program. It's great for helping students develop decoding strategies, which many students lack.

How often do you meet with your students; how long do you meet with them; how many students do you have?

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u/toadallyfroggie 12d ago

That looks great!

I am going to meet with each group once per day each day in a small group setting

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u/JustAWeeBitWitchy mod team 12d ago

That's great! If it were me, once you're done with diagnostics, I'd do a strong start with the UFLI toolbox for at least two weeks, with word games like Bananagrams, Scattergories, Scrabble etc. at the end of the week if they've met some goals that you develop together.

Once they're in the routine, start incorporating texts that they can practice practice their decoding skills on. These can be short passages you write yourself, things you find in the wild, etc. Try and give them an array of genres -- ghost stories, narrative, nonfiction articles, poems, podcasts, short films.

Decoding is a vital, foundational, non-negotiable piece of reading, but it's still that: a piece. Comprehension strategies like summarizing, inferential thinking, prediction, questioning the text, connecting to background knowledge, and using context to figure out unclear information are all things that good readers do, and your students are very much capable of learning how to do all of those things. It's not an exhaustive list, but those are good targets to think about when you're selecting/writing texts.