[LIT] Using Wilson and Textmapping

[Diana Holmes]

I have used Wilson for about 4 years now.  It can be extremely 
effective, if your students have a reading disability.  If your students 
are struggling for other reasons, it is probably best used for encoding 
only--it moves a little too slowly to increase decoding if your students 
have already picked up part of the code.  Teach one sub-step rule per 
week, then give an encoding (spelling) test to see if they've 
internalized the rule.  If they haven't, then that may illuminate one of 
their decoding weaknesses.  You can try pre-assessing a couple of your 
students, to see to what extent decoding is the problem.  We have 90 
minute blocks--I used to use Wilson for 40 minutes, and use Soar to 
Success for 45 minutes.

The problem with Wilson is that there is no comprehension piece built 
in--it truly targets only decoding/encoding.  This year, for decoding 
weaknesses, for my higher readers (all with learning and language 
disabilities, but no reading disabilities per se), I'm piloting class 
use of the software program  Lexia SOS 
(http://www.lexialearning.com/products/reading/sos.cfm.)  It's sort of 
Wilson on speed.  My students love it.   I will let the listserv know of 
my results at the end of the year.  I know that it has been very 
successful with struggling ELL readers at other schools in my county.

In my class, students spend about 20 minutes on Lexia, 15-20 minutes on 
fluency, and 45 minutes on reading and reading strategies.

We just finished our first textmapping project  
(http://www.textmapping.org/overview.html)  in our grade 7/8 reading 
class.  What a blast!  My class has been working on expository text 
structures this year, and targeting main idea skills this quarter.  I 
found a Soar to Success book at their level (grade 4--"How Do Birds Find 
Their Way?") that had NO expository text conventions.  So the students 
became the editors of the book, and their task was to add the 
conventions to make the book more user-friendly, more like a text book.  
They each had a copy of the book, and I photocopied all the pages and 
put them on a very long scroll (about 25 feet) on the wall of the room.  
They worked in two groups of five.  I would sit in a circle with each 
group, and each student was responsible for a page at a time.  The 
student would read the page outloud (pages are very short, about 40-50 
words each) and state what he/she thought was the main idea.  The group 
would tweak the main idea until it could be the descriptive title of a 
section, ie., "Why Scientists Band Birds," "How Do Birds Find Their Way 
at Night?" etc.  The group also had to decide when a section began and 
ended, because sometimes one main idea would run over into two or three 
pages.  The speaking student also had to identify any unknown 
vocabulary.  These words were highlighted on the class textmap, and 
their definitions inferred, then looked up.  When we finished reading 
the book, the students typed up and printed out the headings/titles for 
each section, created a glossary for the end of the book, and created a 
table of contents for the beginning of the book.  Because there were two 
groups, group 1's headers ran across the top of the scroll, and group 
2's ran across the bottom.  What was especially interesting to the 
students were the variations between the two groups in crafting the 
titles/headings.  The glossaries were almost identical, as were the 
essential main ideas.  The students loved this project, and it became a 
great unit assessment for me.  They all passed with flying colors.

Diana Holmes
8th grade Special Educator
Takoma Park Middle School
Silver Spring, MD