tier 2 reading rti intervention strategies using magnatiles
My kids are obsessed with magnatiles and I have yet to meet a kiddo who doesn’t love them. One day, I was building with my kids when I had a crazy idea.
These silly Magnatiles would be perfect for reading RTI intervention! It takes a crazy teacher momma to be thinking about reading intervention strategies while building dinosaur towers with her kids! 🙂 #helloitsme
Yep, you read that right.
Magnatiles are perfect for reading and decoding practice (even decoding multisyllabic words!)…not just STEM exploration and math lessons!
When I was tutoring this summer, I used these magnatiles to help with sight word recognition and early reading foundational skills. Let’s chat about using these awesome manipulatives in this engaging reading RTI intervention activity!
Prepping the Magnatiles for Reading RTI intervention
One thing I LOVE about using magnatiles for reading intervention is the easy prep.
The first thing I do to prep my Magnatiles for reading RTI intervention is to write one word on each Magnatile to make a sentence. I use high frequency words we work on for the decoding level my group or intervention kid is on and then fill in with CVC words or other words I know they can decode.
Don’t have time to prep these ahead of time? Prep them WITH the kids and have them guess (decode) each word as you write it on the Magnatile square.
Tip: I use the same color tile for the entire sentence for two reasons. The first reason is that I just like color coding and if I have two sets of kids in my reading RTI intervention group working on sentence puzzles, we can keep track of whose is whose! The second reason I use the same color is to eliminate the problem of the kids focusing on color as important in reading. I basically want the colors to disappear so the kids are only focused on the visual appearance of the words!
Practice Decoding Each Word
Once, I’ve finished the sentence, we spread out all of the tiles and read each word on the tile in random order. This is to practice decoding and sight word skills. If you do heart words, you could even add hearts on the tiles as needed to help your kids decode!
You may need to hang out on this step and practice decoding each word multiple times. There is no point in trying to build a sentence with the words if they cannot decode them.
Sentence Sequencing
Once they can fluently decode all of the words, the kids get busy ordering the words into a sentence. There are a TON of skills they are using for this: decoding, syntax, language skills, and attending to punctuation and capital letters!
Aside from the “real” reading skills they are practicing, they love that the magnatiles just CLICK together! And that keeps kids hyper engaged on decoding and sequencing the words into sentences.
Seriously, that “click” is soooooo very satisfying!
After we are finished, the kids and I just wipe off the magnatiles with a tissue! And then the tiles can go right back in to their STEM bin!
If I want to use these longer than just for a reading RTI intervention group, then I write the words with a sharpie and then go over the words with a dry erase marker and then wipe off! Did you know about this magical trick? Run, hurry…go try it out now and thank me later!
Don’t have Magnatiles and don’t want to get them? That’s totally fine! You can still to this same reading RTI intervention activity with these printable leveled decodable sentence puzzles.
