Tutoring and Intervention

I've been at a loss here lately about what to write about it. I started this blog to share what was going on in my classroom and other ideas that I had. I feel like lately I haven't been sharing a lot of ideas. It's been more about what we're doing. I enjoy reading about others' classrooms and the things they have going on. So I'm going to try a few posts where I share how I do something. 
At the beginning of February, I started after school tutoring with 4 of my kids. I meet with 2 on one afternoon and 2 on the other for about 30 minutes. I'm starting to see some improvement in them. I thought I would share what we do when we met.
The first group that meets has two students that are almost where they need to be. They started out just saying the sounds in words but not quite at the blending stage. They know their sounds and most of their sight words.
Here's our typical session:
1. We make words using word cards. We've worked on short a words first and now have moved onto short e and short i. I use the book Making words for kindergarten for word lists. I made a word mat and some word cards for valentine's day. We're still using those. (I have them for sale in my Teacher's Notebook store and will have a buggy for words unit up soon. )
Here are a couple of pictures of the kids using the mats. I laminated the word cards but just put the mats in page protectors. Then the word cards go in a ziplock baggie and I can keep it all together.  After a week or two and one of the students was still struggling a bit, I started bribing them with m and ms. Whoever blends the letters and gets the word fastest gets a m and m. It works miracles. They are getting it because they have to do it fast.

2. The next thing we do is use the words that we just built in sentence. These two can do a pretty good job of making up sentences. They use popcorn words and the words we built to write sentences on their white boards. 

 I use this time to talk a little about mechanics. Like putting a space between words, capital letters and periods. It gives them a chance to use the sounds they were working on rather than just reading it. One of these students was really struggling with writing. Well more like he just wouldn't do it. But now when he has to write in class, I don't have to pull it out of him as much. The other student is ELL so it's great for his language.
3. We then read a book together. Our reading series cam with a set of decodable books so I use those during this time. Usually this is a book they haven't read before. I saw on someone's blog and I don't remember where I read this but the idea of having one point to the words while the other one reads. I tried it last week and it worked so well. It kept them both engaged. They struggled with being engaged while the other was reading and I really wanted to hear one at a time read.
4. Last we play a game of some sort. We've played Bingo, hangman, and a hammer game that I made. My kids love the hammer game. These games also review sight words and cvc words that we've been working on. I have the hammer game in my Teacher's Notebook store. It has sight words, short a words, short e words and short i words. I'm working on a spring themed one called Splat that uses a fly swatter.

The second group that I meet with is a little below where I want them to be. They still need practice with sight words and sounds in context. We do similar activities to the group that meets the day before.
Instead of building all cvc words we work on building and reading sight words. One of these students has some language issues so instead of making up random sentences. I give them a sentence frame and they add their own part to use the sight word in a sentence. It wasn't until I was working with them one on one that I really noticed the difficulty they had with making up sentences. After talking to our wonderful speech therapist, she gave me some suggestions for working with sentence frames. (Side note: we have the best speech pathologist. She works on skills we're working on with her therapy and always has great suggestions.) We still read a book and play a game. I'm trying to incorporate a little bit of blending with them but they still struggle with sounds so we're working our way slowly through short a words.
I wish I had some kind of freebie for you but I'm not quite done with my packets yet. I hope to have some short e and short i bingo games ready soon.
Does anyone else do any after school tutoring? What do you do in your intervention time? I'm always looking for new ideas and I hope this helps someone. I would love to hear about your small groups.