Our district’s end-of-year DIBELS testing window opened last week and I jumped right in. It may sound counterintuitive to test my students at the beginning of the testing window instead of three weeks later, but I have found that my students seem to be at their peak in April. Though I don’t make a big deal of the school year ending, the students somehow seem to sense it and their enthusiasm and work quality suffers somewhat during the month of May.
I am sharing my end-of-year DIBELS test scores with you because I want you to know that I do get good results. I reiterate that I want you to feel confident in my abilities, that I’m a blogger to whom you might want to subscribe (or continue subscribing). My testing data is how I know that my daily phonics instruction and my phonics scope and sequence is working; it’s how I know that the changes I made to my small group instruction really paid off; it’s proof that my immediate and targetedLoop intervention with my “red” students worked; and, it suggests that the CVC review and nudge toward WWR (whole word reading) that I did in April was hugely beneficial.
Before sharing the end-of-year scores, I want to tell you about my students in August. It was a typical bunch in that a few knew many letter names and a few sounds; a few knew some letter names and no sounds; and, many knew very few letter names and no letter sounds. I teach at a Title I school and it’s common for students to arrive with no exposure to letters, writing their name, or counting. Parents tend to trust that we will teach them everything. This year, I had ten “red” students—likely to need intensive support—and four “yellow” students who would also need extra support. So, about 61% were below level when they entered, with 43% well below level. It was a pretty typical August in that regard.
What wasn’t typical was my student turnover this year. If my memory serves me right, all the students who were with me in August are still with me now. That is practically unheard of with our population. And another thing, I got no new students after Winter Break, meaning that I had no students who needed to be “caught up” before April. Again, not typical for our school.
Another interesting thing about this school year was that several students missed two or three consecutive weeks of school due to illness or quarantine.
So, what are the results? At this point in the school year, no students are red or yellow. Zero are below the expected end-of-year level and zero are expected to need intensive or even extra support going into first grade. Two students fell into the green category—considered on level and likely to benefit just fine from core instruction alone next year. And the rest? Well, the rest—all twenty-one—are in the blue zone! Well above where they are expected to be!
August 2021:
Red - 10 students
Yellow - 4 students
Green - 3 students
Blue - 6 students
April 2022:
Red - 0 students
Yellow - 0 students
Green - 2 students
Blue - 21 students
Interesting things to note:
All students above the targeted end-of-year (EOY) composite score.
The expected/goal composite score for the end-of-the-year (EOY) is 119. All 23 students scored above 119, with the range being 139-271. The same 23 students scored above the expected goal on middle-of-the-year (MOY) testing, so these results were not a surprise.
Not only can I help with improving your students’ test scores, but the skills assessed here apply to real world reading. I can help you help your students learn to read.
Daily phonics review plus targeted letter naming intervention prior to EOY testing paid off.
There is no goal for how many letters students should name in one minute, but research shows that a young student’s ability to quickly name letters is the best indicator of future reading success. My students could name 36-83 letters in one minute. At mid-year testing (MOY) in December, I had one student who—despite many months of intervention with me and despite seeming to know most letter names—could only name six letters in one minute. Following that, I did a one-month focused intervention with her where we worked on naming letters in a different way; namely, I presented letters to her in rows, rows that resembled the rows of letters she would see on DIBELS (not the same letters but the same format). She improved significantly and named 63 in one minute on the year-end (EOY) testing!
In addition to systematic and explicit whole group phonics instruction, my small group instruction and targeted interventions result in all students learning all the letter names and sounds. I can help ensure you get similar results with your students.
Students show speed and accuracy in segmenting phonemes in words.
On the second subtest—phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF)—students are expected to segment and say at least 40 phonemes in one minute. My students did 62 to 77. This subtest has a ceiling; if it weren’t for that, many students would have gone beyond 77.
I know exactly what it is in my daily instruction that results in speedy and accurate phoneme segmentation. I can share my easy five-minute daily lessons and materials and videos on how to do it so you can get the same results.
Students’ ability to say the correct letter sounds (CLS) for the nonsense word fluency (NWF) subtest is way beyond the expected.
My students did well saying the correct letter sounds on middle-of-the-year (MOY) testing and also rocked the end-of-year testing on this subtest. They are expected to say the correct sound for 28 letters presented. My students ranged from 25 to 123 on this subtest. Even though they were strong on this at mid-year, I saw them struggling with this skill after the new year as I introduced long vowels, soft c and soft g, advanced phonics, and other types of words to read (CVCC, CCVC, CV, CVCe, irregular words, longer words, etc.). I revisited CVC reading a month before end-of-year testing and focused on accuracy and fluency with every single student. You can see the strategy I used here. It was hugely beneficial, not just with nonsense word sounding out and blending, but with whole word reading (WWR) as well.
Way more students of mine can do whole word reading (WWR) this year compared with last year’s students. I attribute this to improved science-based small group instruction and a just-prior-to-EOY-testing intervention that I did with all students in which I gently nudged students away from sounding out and blending and toward whole word reading.
Last year, I had just a handful of students who could read more than a few words whole word style (that is, reading words without first sounding them out). This year, however, more than 2/3 of my class could do some whole word reading. They ranged from reading 3 to 43 words in one minute. While there is no goal associated with this skill in kindergarten, the expectation at the end of first grade is 13 in one minute, which ten of my students can already do.
A strength of mine is backwards planning. If students are expected to do something by the end of the year, I can figure out all the small steps and subskills necessary to meet that goal. Another strength is determining exact weaknesses and designing lessons and interventions to address those weaknesses. You can easily piggyback on what I do—as I’m sure our students share the same struggles—or you can ask for my assistance with situations that are unique to your classroom or your students.
Comparing last year’s scores with this year’s
As many of you know, I started my journey with the Science of Reading in January 2021. My students last year benefited somewhat from what I was learning as I implemented some changes in the Spring of 2021. This was my first year to incorporate my learnings about the Science of Reading into the complete school year. Some aspects of my teaching were not affected. For example, I’ve been doing explicit and systematic phonics instruction along with phonological awareness exercises in first sound fluency, blending, and segmenting for several years. I did, however, make big changes in my small group instruction as I transitioned away from using leveled text and presented my students with primarily decodable materials. I also incorporated individualized phonological awareness training (so I knew exactly where each student was) and changed up the way I taught high frequency words, both regular and irregular.
Because of these changes I was curious how it affected the overall mean composite scores. How did last year’s scores, which were good, compare with this year’s?
End-of-year DIBELS composite scores mean 2021 —> 166.19
End-of-year DIBELS composite scores mean 2022 —> 174.17
My strengths as a kindergarten teacher are my whole group phonics (I take things further than most programs that are out there), my small group instruction, writing instruction, phonological awareness training, and the teaching and practice of high frequency words. I am making a lot of headway in having students learn to spell more by sound and the application of the phonics they’ve learned than by sight. If any of these are areas that you’re looking at improving, I am happy to help you out.
As I write this, I am exhausted. I am finishing up another year of kindergarten; in addition to teaching, this year was spent creating many new materials, implementing new ideas and the new materials, and documenting the whole school year via photos and videos for my paid subscribers. It was a job and a half, but it was well worth it. So many instructional videos were produced and shared and so many ideas were exchanged. Plus, it really benefitted my students!
I recently looked back on some beginning-of-the-year intervention videos where I am working with students who not only know no letter names but are also struggling to learn just one letter name, the letter their name begins with. It often takes weeks of daily one-on-one time for some students to pick up even just a couple letter names. It seems as if these students most likely have a disability. But I keep at it and I remember that kindergarten is all about preventing disabilities. The disabilities are there, but with the right instruction, we can keep them from ever surfacing.
Interested in doing better by your students? Interested in supplementing a program that does not seem to be getting the job done? Interested in how to keep those disabilities at bay?
This summer’s Busy Bee Kindergarten blog content will consist primarily of article summaries (I invest the time to read and learn, you benefit from the quick summaries) and planning for the 2022-2023 school year. Let’s start working on that now rather than later. We can do better for our students!