“This morning we are going to concentrate on synonyms,” said Stacey Daniels, Washington Middle School reading specialist, to a small group of fifth-graders. “Can anyone give me a pair of words that might be synonyms?”

“Happy and glad,” said one student.

“Good pair! A little trick you can use – think of a sentence you can use the word in and then see if you can replace that word with the word you thought of. If it can be replaced, it is often a synonym,” Daniels said.

She, along Jen Cronin and John Calimeri, fellow reading specialists, work with fifth- through eighth-grade Washington students in small group settings as part of Response to Intervention (RTI) on very specific skills that might be challenging to students. Every student at Washington Middle School receives RTI at a certain time each day. Intervention is often viewed as only for students who need extra help or are challenged by a skill, but RTI is meant for every student. It can be an opportunity to provide additional practice to those students who understand what they are learning. It can be time to provide extension activities to those students who have mastered the skill or, it can be time to fill in gaps with students who are still challenged by the skills. The reading specialists help students fill those gaps.

“Students working in small group settings have the opportunity to learn skills at their independent and instructional reading levels,” Calimeri said. “Smaller class sizes allow the teacher to close the gap quicker, and students feel motivated during RTI.”

The reading specialists look at common assessment data to determine what the challenging skills are for each student. The students are grouped by skills. However, the small groups are ever-changing. As a student masters a skill, he or she will move out of one small group and into another. The reading specialists provide individualized instruction to meet the specific needs of each student. There are check-in assessments throughout the year by the reading specialist to determine if students are in the appropriate groups, or to decide where to move them to best serve their reading needs.

The Reading Specialists have always worked with fifth- and sixth-grade students on challenging skills like phonics, fluency, writing, analyzing texts and various other comprehension skills. New this year, they are also working with seventh- and eighth-graders on skills such as reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammar.

“We work with seventh- and eighth-grade students to intervene in skills that were not mastered in fifth and sixth grade,” Cronin said. “It is important to continue a small group instruction even at the higher grade levels. They need text that is at their instructional level that may not be provided in the Common Core.”