For Those of You who DIBELS

How to prepare your students for success

I know there are at least a few of my readers who told me they “signed up because I got good DIBELS scores” and wanted to improve their scores. In this post, I will write about what I am doing now and over the next few months to get the best middle-of-the-year DIBELS scores possible. If your district does not use DIBELS, you can most likely take some pointers from this post and apply them to whatever standardized test your students do have to take.

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What is expected for mid-year DIBELS testing?

There are four subtests:

1) track letters in a line--mixed uppercase and lowercase--and name as many as possible in one minute

2) tell the first sound in words (as many as possible in one minute)

3) segment the sounds in words with three or four phonemes (counts the number of phonemes heard and said in one minute)

4) say the sounds of letters in nonsense CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and, if ready, blend the sounds to make a nonsense word; or, if ready--which is rare in December--read the three sounds all at once as a whole word.

Not only do students need to be capable of these skills but they need to do them fluently. It is important, therefore, to attack this in a two-pronged manner by:

• teaching all four skills via whole group, small group, and individualized lessons

• teaching students how to demonstrate what they know in the DIBELS testing situation (which is much different than demonstrating it in a regular lesson or learning activity).

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What am I doing to ensure students will learn the four skills?

Naming letters:

• I introduce a new letter--both the capital and the lowercase--every other day until the entire alphabet has been taught. This takes approximately 55 school days, meaning that all of the letters will be taught--and reviewed multiple times--by early November.

• Every day of every week during small group instruction we review the letters that have been taught during whole group phonics. How do we review them? I prepare a small group student sheet that includes all the letters that have been taught. The letters are mixed capitals and lowercase and appear in a line across the page. Remarkably, it looks quite similar to the sheet the students will look at during the DIBELS testing. (Yes, I designed them this way intentionally).

  

• More than one-third of the students are involved in daily one-on-one letter name interventions to help them remember the names of the letters that have been taught.

• We work with letter names at several other times throughout the day, including the Name Game and opportunities to apply letter sounds to real reading and writing, which makes letter names more important and interesting.

First Sound Fluency:

• Every whole group phonics lesson includes phonemic awareness training. The first exercise is to repeat words after I say them, emphasizing the beginning sound. So, for example, if we’re learning the letter Gg, I will say, “My turn… g-g-goose. Your turn…” and the students repeat it back it to me, “G-g-goose.” We do several of these every day.

• Some days, we do some exercises from Heggerty. One of them is to isolate and tell the first sound in words. This is a more direct question, similar to the task that the students will do with DIBELS.

• In our small groups, the students are pointing to and reading sentences such as R is for rabbit, R is for rainbow, etc., using whatever letter I just introduced during whole group phonics. You have probably seen these sheets. When the students point to the word and say the picture they see, I have them hold the beginning sound and read it as rrrrabbit, or rrrrainbow. Some may think that I should not be doing this activity as it does not align with the Science of Reading since students are guessing at the words based on the picture clue; but I say that I should definitely be doing this activity because it draws students’ attention to the first sound in words, something they need to be completely competent in by December.

  

• Once a week I do DIBELS progress monitoring and I choose the First Sound Fluency assessment (when they are strong in this assessment, they move on to the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency and possibly Nonsense Word Fluency). My purpose in doing the progress monitoring is not actually to monitor progress. I work with these kids all day every day and am well aware of their progress or lack thereof. Rather, I do it to ensure that the students will become accustomed to the structure and flow of the subtest(s). I want them to learn, over the weeks, that I am going to fire words at them for a solid minute and that they are to tell me the first sound of each word as fast as they can with no lapse of focus, no commenting, no talking to me, no asking questions, nothing. Also, if they are unable to tell me the first sound of a word, I mark it wrong and then model to them how to listen for the sound and answer my questions. In other words, I am using this time to teach and not just monitor progress.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency:

• Phonemic awareness training is part of our whole group phonics routine, and a portion of that is devoted to segmenting words. With phonemic awareness, blending comes before segmenting. You will say three phonemes and teach your students how to blend them together. After your students get the hang of blending then it is time to start segmenting (typically the sixth-eighth week of school for my students). For segmentation practice, I tell the students, “I will say a word and you tell me all the sounds you hear in the word.” These instructions are almost word-for-word the instructions on the DIBELS subtest. So I say jet and the students say /j/, /e/, /t/. In my classroom, we put up one finger for each phoneme. And, yes, I put my fingers up and say the sounds with them initially and then—as they start to learn how to do it on their own—I stop saying the sounds but keep putting my fingers up as the students say the sounds so that I can manage the speed and keep the group together.

• Around the first of October, students will start moving through Kilpatrick’s one-minute phoneme awareness activities. His activities begin on Level D1 and—for whatever reason—do not include the important skills of identifying the first sound in a word, blending and segmenting. So I created a Level A for beginning sound, a Level B for blending, and a Level C for segmenting. I will be working with students in small groups or perhaps even individually at my table during centers to make sure they can all segment words with three and four phonemes. You will see videos of how I manage this; it’s nowhere near as daunting as it sounds.

• Students will have a daily opportunity to segment words and write the corresponding graphemes during writing time.

Nonsense Word Fluency:

• Our whole group phonics routine includes phonemic awareness training, a part of which is me segmenting words into their sounds and the students blending those sounds back into a whole word. With daily support in phonemic awareness blending, doing it by themselves when looking at words (phonics) will come more naturally.

• Every day of every week during small group instruction the students practice blending two sounds. The two-letter words (some real, some nonsense) are made up of letters/sounds we have learned during whole group phonics. By the sixth week, students are blending VC words and they are quite competent.

• The students are also practicing blending during writing time. We draw a picture then write a word or phrase to go with it. One aspect of the writing is to listen to the sounds in words, write the sounds, and then blend the sounds together to read what we wrote.

In summary, here is a checklist of everything I am doing to ensure that my students are well-prepared for the middle-of-the-year DIBELS test:

___ introduce all letters and sounds by the beginning of November; review all daily

___ practice naming the letters--mixed capital and lowercase--in rows during small group instruction

___ do letter name interventions as needed

___ incorporate letter names into other times of the day (Name Game, writing, etc.)

___ use letter formation cues throughout the day to solidify letter names

___ practice listening for the first sounds of words during phonemic awareness training

___ use the first sound isolation exercises in Heggerty

___ elongate and emphasize the first sounds of words and pictures

___ practice blending during whole group phonics

___ practice segmenting during whole group phonics

___ work on individualized phonemic awareness training during small group instruction

___ practice blending during small group instruction, starting with VC words

___ incorporate first sounds, segmenting, and blending into writing time

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Why am I doing this?

It is important to realize that I am not doing these things just so my students will do well on their mid-year testing. I am doing all of this because I believe that these four skills are truly important for laying a good foundation for reading (and writing) and that they are an appropriate expectation for the middle of the kindergarten year.

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Just a reminder… how to get more out of your progress monitoring time:

Treat your progress monitoring time as teaching time, not testing time. Talk to your students during this--explain what it is you are asking and how they should answer you; after marking an item wrong, model to the student how to listen for the first sound; model how to answer. If students try to visit with you, if they get distracted and look away, or they’re not trying their hardest, start teaching them now how you want them to act on the real assessment. Tell them, directly, that they cannot talk during this. Tell them that they can never look away when you are working on this. Explain to them that it is a very short test and you expect them to be focused the entire time. Train them to look at your face (and watch your mouth) as a way to stay focused. For very shy and quiet students, experiment with how to get them to use their voice and take a risk in answering you. Use different motivation techniques. You want students to feel comfortable and confident with these four skills by December.

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Additional tips:

Do not teach long vowels prior to mid-year testing. Try to limit how often you mention that any vowel has another sound. If students are well aware of long vowels going into mid-year DIBELS testing, it will throw a huge wrench into their ability to correctly say the sounds in CVC words. If they are aware of long vowels, they will almost always choose the long vowel sound because it’s easier. Doing this would mean they miss at least one-third of the sounds on the test, drastically reducing their score. By the second half of the year, they subconsciously understand that CVC words always take a short vowel--or you will teach them to not use long vowels on this test--but they cannot understand this before December.

When reading the mix of capital and lowercase letter names in a line, don’t teach your students to say “lowercase m, capital A, capital O, lowercase s, t, z, capital I…” If they get used to practicing this way, they will do it this way during the test and it will really slow them down. They won’t be able to name as many letters in one minute. Teach them to just say, “m, A, O, s, t, z, I…” instead.

If you have students count phonemes on their fingers and use their fingers to segment (and count) sounds in words, tell them (and teach them) not to use their fingers on the phoneme segmentation subtest. Doing so will slow them down. You want students firing sounds at you as quickly as they can, without having to coordinate their fingers.

Progress monitor your red and yellow students often (I try for weekly since I treat it as teaching time and not just an assessment) so they have ample opportunity to practice their skills in this way. Also progress monitor your green and blue students, perhaps once a month. They, too, need to learn how to perform on this assessment. You want them to stay green and blue!

These strategies and teaching with such intention resulted in 100% of my students being at or above level on mid-year DIBELS testing 2021.

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If you do not use DIBELS in your district, what assessment do you use and what ideas can you take from this and apply to your situation?

The key is to use the two-pronged approach: 1) teach the skills required for your test and 2) teach your students how to show off their skills within the structure and flow of the assessment you use.