In the March Issue:
- Best Practices for Using Lexia Software: Accurate Leveling
- Lexia Reading Software and NCLB – A Perfect Fit
- Hurricane Rita and the Value of Lexia Software
Best Practices: Accurate Leveling
Introducing software in an educational environment where a complex set of interdependent factors ultimately determines a program’s success can be challenging. Implementing software like Lexia’s to drive reading achievement requires more than installing the CD. By planning ahead, you can maximize the benefits of using Lexia Learning Systems products.
To help you, Lexia research has identified the best practices associated with student gains. You can use this information to ensure that your school and students attain the greatest possible benefits from using our programs.
Elementary students have highly divergent developmental rates. A typical 1st grade class will include students still learning their letter sounds and others capable of reading and comprehending chapter books. These different skill groups are the norm in the public school classroom and pose various implications for the use of Lexia programs.
By assigning students to appropriate levels, or leveling, you can make sure they get the most benefit from Lexia programs. Because Lexia software activities are skill based, program levels are hierarchical and do not equate to grade equivalents. Instead, a student’s level is based on abilities, not age or grade.
Leveling consists of using Lexia management tools to give a student access to a specific and appropriate set of exercises. This task is simpler for the lowest grades such as kindergarten and 1st grade and becomes more complex with students in upper grades.
To assist teachers and other school staff with the leveling process, Lexia has developed a simple set of guidelines (pdf, 73 KB) available in the documentation that accompanies the product. Lexia advises teachers to level students on the low side of the ability range because a child leveled slightly below his or her skill level will make steady progress and build confidence as well as speed and automaticity. A child leveled too high, above his or her skill level, will experience frustration and initially will be unable to make progress through the program units.
Lexia Reading Software and NCLB – A Perfect Fit
By Sally Grimes, Ed.M.
Founding Director of the Grimes Reading Institute
As someone who has been helping struggling readers learn for over 3 decades, I remember the 1st time I heard that Lexia software was available to teachers and parents. I realized that finally there was a way of effectively giving students the differentiated instruction that they need. And finally, teachers could offer individually prescribed, systematic, multi-sensory, sequential, and motivating instruction to supplement their daily lessons.
Lexia’s software makes assessment-driven instruction, one of the hallmarks of No Child Left Behind, much easier both in terms of assessments and required interventions. If schools are really going to reach and teach children where they are, they need instruments that can indicate exactly what is known and unknown to each child. Using Lexia’s Quick Reading Test, in less than ten minutes a teacher can understand some of the major roadblocks to reading fluency, a goal of Reading First. Further, a teacher can provide software that speaks to those specific skill deficiencies for a specific reader at a specific time.
In order to provide this individualized instruction under NCLB practices, setting up research-based literacy workstations or learning centers is a good way to start. These are central to any well-run classroom, but absolutely critical to classrooms where the goal is to have children extend and practice the individual skills they need. Whether the goal is to attain A.Y.P. (Adequate Yearly Progress), to meet the benchmark for DIBELS (Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills), or simply to improve reading skills, differentiated instruction using learning centers is critical.
Setting up these centers so that learning occurs in accountable and prescriptive ways has turned out to be one of the most challenging tasks for teachers who are fully committed to the tenets of Reading First. One of the easiest and most valuable ways that schools can meet this daunting challenge is to have work stations with Lexia software. Lexia helps teachers establish learning centers that provide meaningful practice while making learning relevant, personal, and engaging for beginning readers.
The Lexia software extends and provides needed practice for the skills the student is learning as part of the general reading instruction program. The goal is to use Lexia software activities as another means of systematically reinforcing the skills taught in the daily lessons. If teachers only use “incidental” phonics or embedded phonics, struggling readers will have random gaps in their reading development. Success comes when a child has multiple opportunities to practice the new skill via spelling lessons, decodable text, home reading, and general lessons. Thus the Lexia work station provides meaningful practice and helps students develop a solid mastery of foundational reading skills.
Now that schools must embrace the tenets of Reading First and the legal requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, Lexia’s assessment-driven and research-based approach is even more important than ever. Lexia software can be a powerful tool for helping reading teachers face the challenges of meeting NCLB requirements by helping students develop a solid mastery of foundational reading skills.
Hurricane Rita and the Value of Lexia Software
As Hurricane Rita bore down on the coast of Texas last September, Jackie Joerns was attending a dyslexia conference in Houston. By the time she left the conference, she knew that she would have to evacuate her family and her 86-year old mother from their homes along the Houston Ship Channel, which was likely to flood. On her way home, she stopped by her school to tell the administration that she had to evacuate and to pack up her 5 computers and take personal belongings from her classroom.
Joerns, a dyslexia and ESL teacher at Deer Park Junior High in Deer Park TX, panicked as she realized that she might lose both her house and her workplace. As she packed up her computers to move them to a higher floor in the school, she wondered what else needed protecting. She zeroed in on her Lexia software and removed it from the computers.
“It took me 20 years of teaching to find the perfect instructional materials, and I was reluctant to lose them,” she explained. “I depend on my Lexia software to structure my classes. I thought that even if the school was damaged, I would at least still be able to teach if I had the software. Since it takes a student about 3 years to go through the entire program, I wanted to protect my students’ records and progress so that it would be easy for them to pick up where they left off when they returned.”
Because they had advance warning of the impending storm and because of what had happened in New Orleans, Joerns and her husband had prepared for the hurricane by completing their wills, getting birth certificates and other important documents from their safe deposit box, and safeguarding photographs. They made plans to fly Joerns’ mother to safety in Atlanta while the rest of the family drove to Longview TX to stay with other family members. Joerns put the most important items, including her Lexia software and a treasured tape of her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, in a briefcase for her mother to hand carry on the plane.
“Getting to the airport and getting my mother on the plane was a real hassle because of traffic and because the airport was short-staffed. My mother couldn’t understand why she was taking ‘music’ CDs along with birth certificates to Atlanta,” said Joerns. “I told her to just protect everything in the briefcase and keep the disks away from the kids.“
The storm didn’t do as much damage as predicted, and with a sigh of relief, Joerns moved back into her house and school shortly after the evacuation. Her mother, however, didn’t return from Atlanta until 3 weeks later.
“That was a long three weeks in school because we had to go back to paper and pencils since we didn’t have the software,” Joerns said. “By the time my mother came back, even the kids missed the software. I can’t imagine teaching without it.”
Spring Trade Show
If you plan to be in Chicago, please stop by and see us.
- International Reading Association (IRA), Chicago, IL, May 1 – 4