[tsmitty61]

I am a literacy support teacher. I teach 1st graders using the Wilson Fundations program. I need help/advice on how to best serve my 4th and 5th graders. At the present time we do not have any type of program for these students. It's a pull out program and I see 4th graders everyday for 40 min and 5th graders 2 days a week for 40 min. as well. We administer the DRA and use that score along with standardized test scores and teacher recommendations to determine which students will be in support. The 4th and 5th graders are really deficient in comprehension. This is an area in which I have not found much to help me help them. I have used various things that I have found online such as readingworks.org. I also have purchased some things through teachers pay teachers. I'd like to know what programs people are using for 4th and 5th graders and I also would like to know what and how you plan what you are going to do. My problem is that I'm not sure that what I am doing is really helping my students. Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Lillybabe]

CARS/STARS has a very comprehensive comprehension program. It takes you through lessons on Main Idea, Inferences, etc. There's a pretest, benchmarks and a post test. It's a relatively inexpensive program. The other thing you might try is look at your DRA2 results and figure out what portions they are missing. The issue with the DRA is I feel at the upper grades it really assesses writing ability more than comprehension. Students may do poorly because they lack writing ability rather than that they didn't understand the story. One of the things I really try to cover deeply is how to retell a story. Once they can retell a story it's easy to teach main idea. Once we can grasp main idea then we can go into things like predicting and inferring. It's challenging to try to cover all of this at once. The biggest issue I find is by 4th grade they can already be significantly behind in reading. This makes it hard to catch up. How is there fluency? Often building fluency alone will greatly impact comprehension. It's hard to understand when you read like a robot.

[tsmitty61]

Thanks so much for the suggestions. The CARS/STARS program looks promising and maybe within our budget!

[Dan]

Free access to many, many lessons at FCRR.