Literacy Interventions in Practice Literacy interventions are in full force at Rogers Street Academy!
At almost any point during the school day you can witness City Year scattered about the hall working diligently at tables with our students, reading out loud, playing interactive literacy games, and striving to provide our students with strong reading comprehension, vocabulary and fluency skills. While using the City Year literacy frameworks, tools and methods has become a fairly smooth and useful process for us in our interventions, this was not always the case.
Three months ago the picture was quite different…
In September, City Year had trained us, and provided us with the frameworks and the tools to perform effective interventions with the students, but we were missing one key component, solid relationships between students and Corps Members. We had only been in schools a couple weeks, the students were still getting to know us and us them. I had six students total on my literacy focus list; I decided to pull students out for interventions in two groups of three. My two groups were as different as night and day. One of my groups began very smoothly, and they responded well to the City Year lesson plan structure, while my other group was not so smooth. They were very distracted and bored during our sessions, so they didn’t respond well to what I was doing in those first interventions.
I decided to look to my teammates for help, and utilize some of their best practices. As we all got to know our students better and develop stronger bonds, we learned how to adjust the City Year literacy frameworks to better meet our students’ needs and diverse learning styles. I soon learned that the group I was having more trouble with was full of kinesthetic, hands-on learners, who respond well to interactive, high-energy activities.
Here are some activities we now use:
•Vocab Baseball and Basketball: these infuse competition and sports terminology into learning vocabulary.
•Vobackulary: a group game where you take a few vocabulary words, write them on post-its or note cards, stick them to your students’ backs, and ask the other students to describe the word on the student’s back until the student can guess what it is.
•Word Count Per Minute Goal Setting: only used during fluency lessons
•Drawing pictures: for vocabulary engagement or reading comprehension
•Writing raps and rhymes
Games like these engaged my distracted, kinetic learners and made our interventions fun! As our relationships have grown stronger with our students, we’ve gained more confidence, and learned to tap into 
our own creativity. My advice to current and future Corps Members when it comes to literacy tutoring, don’t be afraid to make it fun! Students, like us, learn in all different ways, through games and different mediums, and if you aren’t sure if it will work with your students, just try it.
-Ashley Knight, Rockwell Automation Team, Rogers Street Academy
