Words Their Way

REMINDER: Don't forget to enter my Landforms & Biomes Giveaway! It ends Monday, March 31st at 9pm 11:59pm CST. (Giveaway has ended)

Okay, now on to the topic at hand...

Do you use Words Their Way? I love this word study (phonics, vocabulary, and spelling) program because of how easy it is for me to differentiate for all of the students in my classroom.  Recently, my team and I have been having some discussions about how we can more effectively meet the needs of all the students in the grade.

We are going to try out a model of Words Their Way where the students switch rooms to be in a group of students who are at their level.  Each teacher (there are 4 of us) will take two groups and work more intensely with those groups.  We are used to having 4-5 groups each in our self-contained classroom. That was making it difficult for us to get in mini-lessons, and the time it took to plan for that many groups was restrictive.

In order to help us plan and easily see a 6 week overview at once, I made us a 6 week planning sheet.  It has spaces for the current level, the focus skill, and what you want the group to do each day.  There are 2 versions and both versions come in color and black & white.  In one version,  Monday has Meet with the Teacher written after it, and Friday has Assessment written after it.  This is the one I will follow because we have our Words Their Way sorts start on Monday and end of Friday.  I know that not everyone does that, so in the 2nd version, Monday and Friday are blank for you to fill in.

If you would like a copy of the Words Their Way 6 Week Planner, click on the picture below. (Be sure to be logged into your Google Account.)  If you don't have a Google account, you can download it from my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

We are hoping to see even greater gains in what our students understand after a 6 week cycle of this format. Stay tuned closer to the end of the school year to see if this change in model helped our students!

I am linked up this week at:

   

What word study program do you use in your classroom?     How do you implement it? 

(Don't forget to enter my Landforms & Biomes Giveaway! It ends Monday, March 31st at 9pm  11:59pm CST.) Giveaway has ended.