So you’ve pinpointed the literacy skill(s) your students need more help with, and you’ve carved out time for literacy interventions in your schedule. But what should you be doing with students to make the biggest impact on closing their gaps in literacy? Here are our recommendations for what to do during your intervention lessons to ensure your students meet their literacy goals this year.

Planning Around a Specific Learning Goal

The first step in planning effective literacy intervention lessons is to have a specific goal. The goal is based on the skills your students are lacking in reading and writing. Find more information about how to identify specific literacy skills to build lessons around.

Once you have a goal in mind, it’s time to get organized with your planning and goal-setting materials. The Lucky Little Learners Small Group and Intervention Literacy Kit has several tools to make planning easy!

Here is a deeper dive into how to use these goal-setting and planning tools.

Planning Effective Intervention Lessons

There are five-parts to a strong literacy intervention lesson:

1. Set Up (review and practice of skills already mastered)
2. Teach (model and teach the new concept)
3. Engage (teacher-led practice with the new concept)
4. Practice (extended practice with the new concept)
5. Show You Know (quick check of skill progress/ mastery)

Take a look at how the intervention lesson components fit perfectly into the I Do, We Do, You Do lesson model:

I) REVIEW

Set Up (review and practice of skills already mastered)

II) I DO

Teach (model and teach the new concept)

III) WE DO

Engage (teacher-led practice with the new concept)

IV) YOU DO

Practice (extended practice with the new concept)

Show You Know (quick check of skill progress/ mastery)

Let’s take a closer look at each part of a literacy intervention session using a sample lesson about digraphs.

I) Set Up

For the first 3-5 minutes it’s a good idea to get kids warmed up with an activity that reviews previously mastered skills. Some teachers like to set the expectation that as kids arrive at the small group table, they grab the review activity out of a tub and get to work right away. This makes transitions smooth and ensures nobody is sitting around getting wiggly, waiting to begin!

Sound boxes (pictured below) make excellent review activities! Kids choose a card, and use the sound boxes to first stretch out the individual sounds, and second, spell out the word with letter manipulatives. Last, have kids write the word using a washable marker. We’ve listed more hands-on literacy intervention activities HERE.

II) “I DO”

Teach the new concept

The next 3-5 minutes are spent modeling and teaching the new concept. Try using multisensory phonics strategies – a great approach for teaching new phonics patterns!

Word lists and sentences for common spelling patterns are included in the Small Group and Intervention Literacy Kit so you don’t have to rack your brain coming up with words for each of your groups. Huge timesaver!

III) “WE DO”

Engage students with a hands-on activity.

A great way to engage students in practicing the new skill is with one of our hands-on intervention activities.

Check out the video below to see examples!

IV) YOU DO

Practice the new skill in context.

You’ll want to spend the most time in the “practice” stage of the intervention lesson. We recommend around 15 minutes so your students have plenty of time to turn the new concept into a habit!

You can practice a new skill in many ways, but a good idea is to apply the skill kids have been practicing in context. Phonics Reading Passages work really well for this!

Show You Know

Conclude your literacy intervention lesson with a quick check of students’ understanding. This doesn’t have to be a new activity. You can ask students to demonstrate the practice activity one last time without any teacher guidance.

A quick and effective tool to use for this part of the lesson are sentence strips. Simply flip to a sentence that features the new skill and ask kids to read it to you for a quick progress check!

Small Group and Intervention Toolkit Contents

Our literacy kit is designed to give you everything you’ll need to plan and implement effective small group and/or intervention lessons with ease!

Grab a kit for your classroom so you’ll have everything to plan and teach effective small group literacy lessons at your fingertips!