Hitting the Ground Running: What the 1st Few Weeks are Like for a Reading Specialist

Hello again Readers,

It's been quite a busy few weeks in the world of the Reading Specialista! My school just had it's first full week of classes, and everything's starting to get into full swing for everyone! For me, I've really been able to have a new found respect for the saying that a Reading Specialist wears many hats. I decided to document what I've been up to for the past month, as many future or current Reading Specialists may want a comparison/confirmation point and many teachers and parents may be wondering, "What does that Reading Specialist do all day anyway?" In short, a lot a bit of this, and a lot a bit of that! As a bonus, I'm also including some organizational forms I used when working with different populations in the school. Feel free to use them if you are a Reading Specialist, and classroom teachers may find them useful too, especially my small group intervention forms!

Setting Up My Classroom

Just like regular classroom teachers, I had the job of setting up my classroom, but it was a bit different, because my classroom is actually our school's library, and this was the first year that I was transforming it into the Literacy Lab. This role that I have is a bit different from the traditional Reading Specialist role, because I am responsible for teaching Reading Enrichment classes for grades PreK3-5th each week. I see PreK3-Kinder two times a week, their first class focuses on alphabet knowledge, phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency, and their second class is a comprehension lesson. I then see 1st-5th once a week to give them comprehension strategy instruction (predictions, connections, questioning, sequencing, etc.) 

Therefore, I had to transform the Library into the Literacy Lab. To do this, I reorganized the shelves, integrated my literacy supplies, selected more Literacy Learning posters and elements to put in the room, and organized the space to provide for more interactive lessons. The pictures show the result of the setup work. (I'm still kicking myself for not doing a before picture, but at least you can see the "after" ;-) ). I will say, it was harder for me to set up my classroom this year, because unlike before, I wasn't sure when I'd feel done. I knew how to set up my 3rd grade classroom so well, that it felt like I'd never be done in the Literacy Lab. I can say that after 2 weeks of working, however, it finally feels like my new little home, and it was ready for students and fully functional this past week!

Working with Admin

Another unique challenge to my year this year is that I am the first Reading Specialist we've ever had at my school. Because of this, I've worked extensively with the Administration in the past year to create my job description and responsibilities and over the past couple of weeks, I've been in communication with the Administration at my school to follow-up with those responsibilities to ensure I was covering the needs of the school.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have worked with my principal and assistant principal to make sure we were all on the same page for the literacy development needed to continue to move our school forward which I would provide for both our students and our faculty. We decided on full-group professional development topics I would give for the first few months of school which included Daily 5 workshops, Standards-Based Grading for reading teachers, DRA training, DIBELS training, and the STAR assessment training through the AR program. We also discussed the frequency with which I would meet with small groups for further instruction, and I talked about how I would be meeting with teachers to provide individual coaching and support. After these discussions and meetings, we had a good shared game plan that we could use to support our school's literacy endeavors. 

Working with Teachers

Once my classroom was set up, and the other teachers had set theirs up during inservice as well, I started to meet with the other teachers to set their goals. I used the goal setting sheet below to help facilitate these meetings. Basically, I met with every reading teacher and asked them to pick three areas of growth which they are interested in working on during this first quarter. After they chose those goals, I asked them to pick one which they are most interested in working toward for the first quarter. I did this, because it's not realistic to ask teachers to work on three areas at once, and this way, we'd have a starting point for when they wanted to make goals for the next quarter. 

Then, I asked them to tell me ways they wanted me to support them in achieving this goal. I offered modeling lessons, observation and feedback, giving resources, and being available to coplan or to just drop in every once in a while to have a conversation about what they were up to. I felt it was important for me to find out how each teacher wanted my support, so I could differentiate my professional development for them, and so they could choose a way to welcome me into their teaching that made them feel comfortable. This allowed me to build rapport instead of stepping on toes! I then organized all of the completed goal sheets in my Teacher Binder.

Feel free to use my goal planning sheet if you are a Reading Specialist at your school!

Teacher Goal Planning Sheet

Working with Students

Although many Reading Specialists do not have this opportunity, I actually do have a class of my own, Literacy Lab. Students from PreK3-5th grade come to my class, and I provide reading enrichment lessons to them, and allow them the opportunity to check out books. Because of this, I had to have my yearly plan prepared and ready to hand in, and I do plan official lesson plans each week as well in addition to my job as a Reading Specialist. 

The best part of Literacy Lab, aside from seeing all the students, is providing a place for me to model lessons and ideas for other teachers. Teachers are free to come and see what I'm up to in Literacy Lab in case they want to adapt some of these ideas in their own classroom! 

Organizing for Small Groups

The last hat I have been getting accustomed to wearing is preparing for small group intervention instruction. During the first couple of weeks of school, I met with teachers from grades PreK3-4th to get their input on students whom they think would benefit from additional small group instruction in literacy. After getting their lists, I crafted a parental consent letter both to get permission to teach these students and possibly pull them out of the classroom to do so, and to notify the parents that their children would be in small group instruction.

After this, I looked over our school schedule and picked out times to meet with these groups. I will meet with PreK3-PreK4 once a week for language development, letter recognition, and phonemic awareness instruction, and I will meet with Kinder-4th for fluency, decoding, and comprehension twice a week. To better keep my groups and student data in order, I also created the following forms that you are free to use! They all live in my binders. One is for Early Childhood, and the other is for 1st-4th grade. The first form is to track the lessons we do in small groups, so I can continually plan and keep track of what we're doing. One is for individual student work in groups, so I can annotate their progress, and a final form is to keep track of the assessments I give them throughout the year, so I can have an area to organize the data I collect on each case and show growth. My hope is that these forms will be useful for me to keep organized, and to communicate progress to both teachers and parents.

Small Group Intervention Form

Individual Small Group Comments

Individual Progress Monitoring Form


So that's just a bit of what it's like to wear the many hats of a Reading Specialist! I hope now that if you're a parent or a teacher you have a better idea of just exactly what that Reading Specialist does all day! Stay tuned for more parent tips in my next blog post, and until next time...

Yours in Literacy,

The Reading Specialista