DIBELS Website



DIBELS

Instructional Strategies

Vicki Holt

March 2004

For all subtests:

• Be deliberate in your teaching. Plan to teach the skill daily/weekly. Think through how you are going to teach the skill. Put it in your plan book so that nothing is left to chance and you can document your instruction.

• Progress monitor weekly for intensive students, less often for others.

• Progress monitor your own students. The classroom teacher responsible for the child’s reading should do the progress monitoring to guide instruction.

• Look for ways for students to practice the subtest skill, for example, make it a center activity.

• Make no excuses for children not making the benchmark. These students don’t need excuses for why they can’t do something; they need help learning how to do it. The only exceptions to this are special education and transfer students and possibly some ELS.

• Keep track of what you are doing to teach these areas; not only for documentation purposes but if you are successful you will know what you did so it can be replicated.

Letter Naming Fluency

• Spend 5 to10 minutes daily doing a fun “drill” with a chart or line of letters patterned after the progress monitoring booklets. Have children read it and then repeat it faster. Flash cards would work as well.

• Sing and drill the alphabet daily

• Building memory trace activities

Initial Sound Fluency

• Spend 5 to10 minutes daily doing a fun “drill” with picture cards. Have children keep practicing until they are quick with responses.

• Building memory trace activities

• Alphabet books

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency

• Spend 5 to10 minutes daily doing a fun “drill” with words from the progress monitoring booklets. Have children keep practicing until they are quick with their responses.

• Making words activities

• Model sounding out words when “writing to and with” students

• Finger spelling words

• Elkonin boxes

• Encourage children to sound out words when writing

Nonsense Word Fluency

• Spend 5 to10 minutes daily doing a fun “drill” with words from the progress monitoring booklets. Have children keep practicing until they are quick with their responses.

• Be sure that children understand that they are practicing words that don’t make sense and tell them this will help them read big words they don’t know. Children need to understand why you want them to read these kinds of words so it doesn’t interfere with their making sense of the texts they read. Look for big words to use as examples, such as, if you can read ‘ment’ then that will help you read words like statement, department, etc.

• Teach students how to respond one way only during progress monitoring. Either say the sounds or read the word, but not both, which eats up precious seconds.

• Teach word families. Make a list and add all consonants to the ending rime. Have children read these words and identify the ones that are nonsense. For example, at: bat, cat, dat, fat, gat, hat, jat, kat, lat…

• Teach chunking

• Make up nonsense words. Using magnetic letters or letter cards, place the vowels in a container and the consonants in another. Pull out one vowel and two consonants and make a word with it.

• Use Dr. Seuss books to point out and read nonsense words

• Use Reading Rods to make words with chunks. Children identify if word is real or nonsense.

Oral Reading Fluency

• Volume of reading is critical. Be sure your students are given the opportunity to read at school 60-90 minutes daily. This can take many forms such as independent, small group, partner or buddy, AR, basal, leveled books. Be sure your students are reading all day long, in all content areas and are exposed to a variety of genres.

• Read aloud to students daily so they hear fluent reading modeled.

• Teach and model what fluent reading is and sounds like. Talk about being a fluent reader; call attention to it when a student is reading fluently. Have students echo read after you so they can experience what fluent reading feels like.

• Students should practice fluency on text that is on their independent reading level. Fluency comes from reading easy text that you know.

• Teach a poem/passage weekly to entire class, each day focusing on a fluent reading exercise. For example, on Monday, discuss phrasing and how to read it fluently and model fluent reading. Tuesday, choral read together. Wednesday, echo read. Thursday, partner read. Friday, have partners time each other. Be sure to make two copies of the text for each child, one to practice at school and the other for home practice.

• For 2nd and 3rd grade students, progress monitor on their reading level three weeks out of the month. Use 1st or 2nd grade progress monitoring books for this. Progress monitor on the student’s grade level once a month. These students will have two progress monitoring books.

• Teach the progress monitoring passage and let the student practice it after the student has been timed on it. One way would be to time the student on the passage on Monday. Over the next three days work with the student on it and then retime student on Friday.

• Teach your students to time each other. Provide passages and teach students to watch the second hand on the classroom clock or provide timers. One child times the other for one minute and then they calculate the WPM (words per minute). Have the reader reread the same passage three times and notice the improvement with each reading.

• Readers Theater.

• Listen and practice reading to books/passages on tape. You can tape your reading for them on the passages.

• Let student tape record him/herself reading so he/she can hear what he/she actually sounds like.

• Pair a fluent reader with a non-fluent reader to practice together.

• Choral reading and echo reading

• Repeated reading of passages and books

• Work on phrasing. Sight word phrase cards can be purchased at Learning Experiences.

Englewood has initiated two programs, since the winter benchmark, to target oral reading fluency for their third graders. You may want to contact them for more information. You will be hearing more about these programs if they lead to improved spring DIBELS scores.

1) Read Naturally For $99 you can purchase a book and audiotape of passages for a particular reading level from 1.0-8.0. Checkout their website:

2) Fast Start Program to educate parents on oral reading fluency and how to help their child at home. Passages are sent home for children to practice.

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