WHY? In order to become accurate with reading (or writing) a new phonics concept, students need many opportunities to practice! Once students become fairly accurate (about 90%), they are often still reading slowly and laboriously. They now need to work on fluency. Accuracy and fluency can both be improved with blocked practice, UFLI Roll & Reads, and strategic partners. Additionally, phonics concepts must be reviewed through spaced and interleaved practice in order to consolidate learning and move through to the generalization stage where students can read words with a new phonics concept not only in lists (or Roll & Read), but also in the context of a sentence and a passage.
“Through blocked practice, cognitive effort is reduced, and accuracy and automaticity are increased.”
– Jamey Peavler, What do we Mean by Practice? (2023)
When Roll & Reads from UFLI are used for independent practice, it is essential to also have students paired in strategic partners/triads. Students must receive corrective feedback when they are still developing accuracy with a skill, otherwise they are simply practicing mistakes and mislearning.
*Learn more about the Instructional Hierarchy and its stages: accuracy, fluency, and adaptation/generalization.
HOW? In order for students to be able to play UFLI Roll & Reads independently, you will need to create Strategic Partners. Watch my Strategic Partners video or read my Strategic Partners Blogpost and sort your students from most fluent decoder to least fluent decoder and form partners/triads, taking behaviour and personalities into account! You can initially sort your students based on your observations, but it is helpful to assess students using either the Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) screener found in DIBELS or Acadience, or the CORE Phonics Survey / SD36 Phonics Survey. The NWF screener is a 1 minute assessment and can give you a quick snapshot of how students are applying their phonics knowledge to decoding, whereas a Phonics Survey will take longer to administer and will give you more specific information about which phonics concepts have been mastered in reading.
1. Consider whether you will reuse the Roll & Reads or whether students will likely play them once. If you would like to reuse them, you can slip them into page protectors and have students use dry erase markers to mark read words.
HOT TIP: Use the same colour dry erase markers if you want students to work together to read all the words. Alternately, students can use different coloured dry erase markers to see which words they have each read.
If you are using UFLI Roll & Reads and the associated decodable passages, you may want to photocopy them back to back and have students place them in duotangs. In this case, you will want to have the students use crayons to mark read words. Crayons won’t bleed through to the story side!
HOT TIP: Have students draw an ‘X’ over the word after they read it. This has two advantages. One, it does not take as long to make an X as it does to colour in the entire box. Two, students can play the game a second time if they finish early or at another time by shading in the box on the second play.
2. Dice. Roll & Read games use one die. You can give student partners a foam die to use when playing Roll & Read. This ensures that it is not too loud when students are playing the game. However, I find that dice still end up rolling across the table or onto the floor! My preferred method is to use simple plastic snack containers form the dollar store and teach students to roll their die in the container. My rule is that if the die lands outside of the container, the roll does not count and they should roll again, more carefully.
HOT TIP: Use dollar store plastic storage containers to control dice rolling! The container also dampens the sound of rolling dice.
In grade 1 this year, we have been lining up the supplies as shown in the picture below. When students play Roll & Read, they line up with their partner and take one die, one plastic storage container (for rolling the die), and each choose a different coloured crayon.
HOT TIP: Choose spot in your classroom (table, bookshelf, counter) where you will regularly put out the supplies for Roll & Read so that students know where to go to pick up their die, plastic container, and crayons!
3. Establish routines for Roll & Read. I recommend using Strategic Partners for Roll & Read so that students who are less accurate with the taught phonics concept can have corrective feedback from their partner. When we first start Roll & Read, I teach students how to help their partner if their partner can’t read the word. I model how I can say the sounds in the word and let my partner blend the sounds together. Then I give my partner a ‘thumbs up’ if they read the word correctly or I can help them blend it if the word was read incorrectly. I’ve developed the poster below for Roll & Read routines.
HOT TIP: When introducing Roll & Read, model following the guidelines with a partner (partner can be another adult in the room or a student).
4. Variations. Once students are familiar with following the guidelines for Roll & Read and have been playing for a couple of months, you can introduce a variation.
- Connect Four: students play on the same UFLI Roll & Read sheet, but when they roll a number, they can choose any word that column to read. They each try to get ‘four in a row’, either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
- Battleship: students clip their duotangs together to form a ‘wall’. Each student marks five words as their ‘ships’ by outlining the box in one colour. Students take turns rolling the die and choosing a word in the column to read. They are trying to discover their partner’s ‘ships’! Please note, for battleship, students must be already accurate with reading the words since they won’t be able to help one another.
Happy rolling and reading!
