Organizing Intervention Students

Part 3 of my Intervention Series focuses on Organizing Students with Class Flyers.  This series shares about my journey as a K-6 interventionist.  If you’d like to read the posts in order, all the links are at the end of this post.

One key aspect of teaching intervention is actually having the kids show up.  Even though the list of students came from the homeroom teacher, they are busy.  If you don’t help them remember who to send, you’ll be spending a lot of time tracking down kids.

My solution was to create a class flyer.  As I enter my third year in intervention, I have learned how to do this a bit more efficiently and I thought I’d share this with you.

My first year the referrals were by hand so I had to type the kids names onto my flyers.  This was time consuming and the handwriting was at times hard to interpret.  So, when kids came to me, they were sometimes upset that I had spelled their name wrong.

My second year the referral was through a google doc form.  First, I made sure to have the teachers enter the names in a column.  (Type the name and hit return.)  This allowed me to easily copy and paste the names without needing to remove commas.  This was great.  What used to take 5-10 minutes per grade now took 1-2.  I don’t know about you, but I need every minute I can get!

One important tip: Have your teachers decide who is Teacher A, Teacher B, and Teacher C.  When they fill out your referral, have them always type kids into those columns.  When it is time to copy and paste student names, this will save you time.

After typing the forms, I put them in the teachers’ boxes.  The first year, I would wait to give them out the Friday before.  By the second year, I just handed them out whenever I printed them.  Some teaches were great about posting them behind the current one.  Sometimes they got lost in the shuffle.

This year, I created a password protected website with an embedded google slide.  The teachers will have access to the slides online.  I will be saving paper and time by not printing and distributing them.  Teachers that don’t want to pull up the website during class, will be able to print a copy if they prefer.

First, I can not tell you how excited I am to have a password protected site and to switch to Google Docs and Slides to share my info.  I’m excited to save paper but even more excited to know that any updates I make will be updated for everyone.  This amazing idea came from Tabitha at FlapJack Educational Resources. I’m so excited about how much easier this will make it to communicate with my fellow teachers about intervention.

Part 3: Organizing Students for Intervention