Classroom Tour: Language

My language station is meant to work on developing and maintaining fluency (speed and accuracy) of skills.  Each student has their own set of flash cards.  We store them in the top shelf of this handy-dandy shelf I got from IKEA.

The student flashcards cover a variety of topics from sight words, to money identification, telling time, labeling pictures, or naming letters/numbers, as well as many more.  I choose different sets (usually about 3 per student) based on each student's IEP goals and areas of need.

This station is run by one of my assistants.  2 students come to the station at a time and they are there for a 15 minute time period.  One student works with the assistant on flashcard timings and the other student works on independent work in their red binder.

Flashcard Timings:  The student who is working on the flashcard timings uses their BLUE binder.  This is actually a data binder which the assistant completes, but I find the colors help the kids differentiate between what they will do each day.  

1.  The assistant sets the timer for a pre-determined amount of time (as indicated on the data sheet).  Timings are generally 30 seconds or 1 minute.  
2. The kids go through as many flash cards as possible during that time.  While doing the timing, the assistant sorts the cards into "correct" and "incorrect" piles.
3.  At the end of the timing, the assistant records the corrects/incorrects on the data sheet.  

They continue this process for all of the flashcard sets.  Then, if they have extra time, the assistant helps the student practice any cards they need to work on.  Here is an example of a data sheet the assistant fills out for the timings.  I have written in the name of the set, the total number of cards in the set, how long the timing should be, and the mastery criterion.

Another sheet kept in the inside of the binder is a mastery list.  Each time a student masters a set of flash cards, we will list them here with the mastery date.  This is a nice summary sheet to look back on at the end of the year.

I have also set up data sheets/graphs on my iPad, so once a week, my assistant or I will input the data into the iPad so we can keep tabs on students growth and know when to move onto new sets of cards as well as when we may need to implement additional interventions to help a student make more progress.  Here is an example of one of those graphs from a previous year.

Independent Binder:  The student who is not involved with working with the assistant, works in their RED independent binder.  

Right now, I have a section of number sheets and a section of color worksheets for my beginner group to work on.  



My more advanced kids are working on WH questions, sight words, following directions, and other language arts related worksheets.  

I keep the schedule posted for who has the BLUE binder vs. RED binder for each day.

I also keep a master list around with the number of flashcards in each set.  This helps us determine if any cards are missing from the deck as well as helps with faster calculations when counting corrects/incorrects with cards.

 Soon, I hope to include my fluency timings from TPT at this station as well.  We are just finally getting this station running since a lot of set-up time was needed on my part.    I'm super excited about this station this year.  A lot of my kids need to work on getting faster and more fluent in a variety of skills, so I can't wait to work on it with them!  I'm especially excited to track their data!!  Now that I have more than one iPad, I am hoping to use one just for data and not have to share it with my kiddos all the time!

What kinds of things do you do for fluency in your classroom?