Sight Words Monitoring and Organization

First up, here's a pic of what my new literacy rotation board looks like. It takes up hardly any space at all, so I'm quite happy with it.

 My class does 3 of the Daily 5 choices per day, so on the first day, they'd do the top row, on the second they'll do the second row. It will repeat for the next two days (I do these 4 days per week). It sits above my Word Sorting schedule.

Tonight I thought I'd post about how I organise my sight words. I totally stole this idea from Jen Jones at Hello Literacy. Back in June, she posted about Progress Monitoring vs Monitoring Progress and she had pics of her Rainbow Sight Words set-up. I was so hyped up on the idea, that that very second I made up my own set that aligns with the sight words my school requires our students to know (at the time, she didn't have her pack available). I took our Grade 1-3 Sight Words and put them in groups of 20 and assigned each group a colour.  I have a mum that comes in first thing in the morning on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to go through the words with the kids. I have have all the cards and progress monitoring sheets stored in these handy dandy folders. 

As soon as I saw this rainbow striped folder at the shops, I knew I just had to grab it! The green A5 expanding folder was only $1.99 at Office Works. I made up the labels to go on it.

Inside the folder, I printed out labels to stick on each of the tabs that align with the colours I'm using. Inside each pocket, I've got bookmarks with the 20 words for that level as well as 2 copies of the sight words on cards. Everything is colour coordinated. Sorry about the dark photos, I brought it all home because I ran out of time yesterday to take them. It's night here, and I just couldn't get a bright photo.

 

Inside the striped folder, I have instructions for what the mum does each day, as well as a monitoring sheet for each student. She only meets with each child for about 5 minutes to read through the words, chant the spelling, match up the cards, try spelling the words etc. The last activity she does is have the student read through the bookmark. The child colours in on their graph the number of words they read correctly in 20 seconds. Once they can read 20 words in 20 seconds they progress to the next level. 

She meets with about 10 of my students who are still developing automaticity with high frequency words. The repitition and routine is great for my ESL and learning difficulties students.

I keep track of their level using this (very quickly) painted rainbow. Next time, I think I'll take a bit more time to get it looking better! I had so many words I also had to use brown and grey (hence the bird and clouds). I have each kiddos name on a raindrop, which they love moving up the rainbow! 

I read the other day that Jen has now listed her Rainbow Words pack on TpT. You can read about it on her blog here. Her rainbow is much cuter than mine! I only wish she had the pack ready back on the 1st June when she wrote about it the first time!

Edit: I forgot to mention that my everything in my TpT store is 20% off at the moment for the Back to School Sale. Put in code BTS12 on the 12-13/08/12 to receive an additional 10% off the reduced price! For my Aussie/Kiwi followers, the code may not work until late on the 12th because of the time difference between us and the U.S.

2nd Edit: I had 100 000 page views last month! Holy moly! Thank you!