CYBER SALE! ➔
I love doing whole group lessons with my language kiddos you can cover a lot of language skills. Lately, I have been using non-fiction text and articles to target vocabulary, inferencing, grammar, answering wh-questions and citing evidence. The therapy is more engaging when everyone is discussing the same topic, but it can be difficult to take data during the session. Usually each student only answer 1-2 questions independently, which doesn’t give me very accurate data because if they miss one question, then they are only 50% accurate. One of my great SLP friends gave me her little tip about taking group data and I have been using it ever since!
When I want to progress monitor my students, I grab one article or passage and photo copy it. I also photo copy the questions and answer choices (used Spotlight on Reading & Listening Comprehension: Understanding Everday Information) or have the questions prepared ahead of time that I will read out loud to the students. I put file folders up, so people can’t see each others answers and have them write their answers on scratch paper. This time I had them read the passage to themselves and answer the multiple choice questions. I wanted to see how they do independently as this is how it is in the classroom setting. Then, I either review the answers or grade them at a later time, so I can move onto another activity!
That activity took my two language groups about 10-15 minutes to complete and I got some great data from each student! We had time to play my “inference challenge” game, which I was to get even more data!! Oh yeah!
In previous weeks, we were working on making “inferences” and citing the evidence to back up our “smart guess”. Last week, we did an “inferencing challenge” where the winner got two sour punch straws! Everyone got one for trying their best.
I used task cards from Rachel Lynette’s TPT store which had awesome inferencing passages. The students could get a point for answering the inference question and another point for citing the evidence. This way I could award a point if they got part of the answer correct. I had each student write down the answers and then share with the group before I revealed the correct answer. The kids loved the competition aspect, I got better performance from the group and I took data for each student without it being influenced by other people’s participation.
How do you take data with your upper elementary and middle school language groups?
