Skip to main content

Another Great Semester in Read 180

    
Some days in Read 180 can be pretty monotonous, especially the software. When Read 180 first came out over ten years ago, kids were thrilled to use it! For most of them, it was the only computer they used all day. However, as computers and cell phones have become ubiquitous on our campus, the novelty of the program has definitely waned! Therefore, I have had to look for ways to not only help my students improve their reading but to also keep them engaged! I have written about a variety of these activities in my previous posts.

Yet, it is all worth it when students take the SRI test at the end of the semester. HALF of my students met the requirements to exit the class. TWO of them are now reading at ADVANCED and are even talking about taking English Honors next year. I had my students write a reflection about the semester (I provided them specific questions and an example).


Here are a few:





I started Read 180 at the beginning of the school year. My first lexile score began at 669. We have done many activities together. We do Newsela quizzes daily which bumps your lexile up. We read scholastic magazines which tell stories about people surviving extreme disasters or any other life or death situations. Both these reading articles are full of interesting information that you would never think of. We most likely work with partners on some of the quizzes. These articles increase your knowledge with reading. Sometimes every once in awhile we play some fun computer games online (Kahoot). The most often rotation that is used is the read 180 program, which nobody enjoys including me. We obviously read as a rotation, but read independently in a quiet area. Another rotation is where we work in small groups with our teacher and answer vocabulary questions. We used to watch Ted talks where you watch a video and write down whatever you can comprehend. My Goal at the beginning of the year was to get at least an 830 lexile. My most recent score is 842 and had gained 153 points so far. My goal had been to reach 1,000. Even though I was disappointed about reading instead of my elective this class increased my skills with reading and definitely was worth it.  


    I started this Read 180 class slightly after the school year started. My lexile was 543 I am in the seventh grade. We do many activities. This includes, reading Scholastic magazines, reading and taking quizzes on Newsela, listening to Tedtalk speakers on different categories, working on an activity called Read 180, and reading books individually or with Mrs.Karney. Every activity that we did in this class was so much fun in this class except for the Read 180 because it was boring, but when I think about it, Read 180 was the thing that helped me get all the way to what I was not expecting to be at this point. My goal of the year was to gain my lexile up to 900. My most recent score was 1189! I gained more than 600 points. I have achieved my goal and I am so proud of myself. I am now reading above my grade level. My progress has made me a smarter person before I had joined this class. Now, I feel confident joining honors English next year.




I started Read 180 at the beginning of the 7th grade year.  I am currently in 7th grade.  My first lexile score was 741.  We do lots of activities in this class including our rotations.  Our rotations are independant reading, topic CD, (which I don’t really like) and a small group with Mrs.Karney.  We also do Newsela in this program we read a passage custom fit to our reading level and take a quiz on what we have read.  Newsela has helped my test taking strategy and process of elimination as well as my reading comprehension.  My goal in the beginning of the year was to gain 30 points.  My most recent  score was 1,419 I have almost doubled that score gaining a whopping 678 points.  My goal was to gain 30 points and I destroyed that goal.  I am very proud of my achievements in this class and would recommend it to anybody struggling with reading.  My scores in this class prove that if you work hard at something anything is possible.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TQE: Get students Engaged and Digging Deep

I've mentioned before how Twitter has helped me grow as an educator.  Edutwitter is a valuable resource for book recommendations, new teaching methods, lessons, and articles.  One of my favorite educators to follow is Marissa Thompson, a high school teacher at Carlsbad High. This summer I read about her TQE(thoughts, questions, epiphanies) method for discussing literature.  I'd always longed for having discussions like the ones I had in my college literature courses, but when I try fishbowl or Socratic seminar with my students, the discussions felt forced, flat, and awkward. That changed today when I tried TQE for the first time.  Sharing homework in small groups Students writing their TQEs on the board When I listened to Marissa's podcast on Cult of Pedagogy ( check it out here ), I was intimidated. After all, her students are in high school and have a rock star teacher.  I think I read the transcript twenty times before finally trying it....

Writing an Essay...with a Partner

I love technology for collaboration! Teaching writing to middle school students is not easy.  All students come with different skills and knowledge.  With 35 students in a class, it's impossible to sit down one on one and assist students with the writing process.  Teaching students to write a literary analysis is particularly challenging because most seventh-graders have little, to no experience.  Students need to learn to  develop a thesis statement, find evidence from the text to support it, provide the context of the selected quotations , and write insightful commentary on the evidence they selected. Remember, these kiddos are twelve! Graphic organizers are particularly helpful to these young writers. The biggest challenge is providing feedback to students as they are writing, rather than after they turn their work in for a grade.  Students need to be able to use the feedback they receive and see the difference it makes in the final product.  I...

Mock Trials-Periods 0 and 2

MY Ethan Couch (notice the shirt) Wow!  What a fantastic week it has been for me as a teacher!  My students have been working hard preparing for their assigned cases and getting ready to go to trial.  Each group was assigned a case based on an article we read in class.  One case was about a sixteen-year old  boy named Ethan Couch.  He had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit when the car he was driving hit a disabled vehicle and killed four innocent people.  He receive one year of rehabilitation in Malibu and ten years probabtion as his punishment. His attorneys blamed his behavior on what was called "affluenza."  Please ask your child about this word and how it was used to defend him in court! The other case involved for teens who threw an eight pound rock over an overpass and struck the passenger side of a vehicle.  The passenger was Sharon Budd, a middle-school English teacher and breast cancer survivor.  Sh...