Reading Recovery---a Tier 3 Intervention!

I spend half of my day one-on-one with the most challenging first graders in our building!  Reading Recovery was developed by Marie Clay of New Zealand. It is an early intervention program to serve children in first grade who are having difficulty learning to read and write.  Reading Recovery is a highly effective one on one early literacy program designed to help bring the lowest performing first graders to the average of their class. Reading Recovery utilizes and builds upon genuine conversations between teacher and child as the primary basis of instruction. This teacher-child dialogue has been found to be an effective method for teachers to help students learn to deal with complex tasks such as reading. The Reading Recovery lesson follows a strict routine of components containing activities that are molded to meet the individual needs of each child based upon a daily analysis of student progress by the teacher.  A Reading Recovery lesson lasts 30 minutes and has several components: 1. The child rereads several familiar books building fluency. 2. The child rereads a book introduced in the prior lesson while the teacher does a running record, and the teacher chooses a powerful teaching point to move the child forward. 3. The child is guided toward discovering how words work through developing visual scanning through letter knowledge and word structure awareness. 4. Next, the child writes a story with the teacher providing opportunities for him/her to hear and record sounds in words and take words to fluency.    5. The child rearranges his/her story from a cut-up sentence strip provided by the teacher. 6. The teacher introduces a carefully selected new book for its learning opportunities, and the child reads the new book orchestrating his/her current problem-solving strategies. Strategies to look for:                                                                     *Directional movement * One-to-one matching       * Locating known/unknown words       Advanced Strategies: * Checking on oneself/self-monitoring      * Rereading * Cross-checking           * Searching for cues/Self-correcting     * Integrating Meaning, structure, and visual information                              Reading Recovery occurs daily and typically lasts from 12-15 weeks.