What's the Story, Champ?

I've just come back from a quick trip to Sydney, where the light display, Vivid, opened.
While I enjoyed seeing the Opera House and Harbour Bridge illuminated, the purpose of my visit was to learn more about a language intervention called 'Story Champs'.

I'd heard whispers about this program and how effective it is, but I'd never seen it in action and was hesitant about the price of shipping it from the US. So when the opportunity arose to order it with free shipping and attend face-to-face PL on it, I jumped on the chance! 

I joined a room full of speech therapists, as one of a handful of teachers (and one grandparent who wanted to learn more about supporting her grandchild). We heard from Dr Trina Spencer and Dr Douglas Peterson who met as doctoral candidates and discovered they were both passionate about literacy development. Their research led to the creation of Story Champs and the CUBED assessment both of which are available from Language Dynamics.

The science of language and reading is becoming more mainstream. It is great that the skills needed for the word recognition side of the simple view of reading are becoming more common in Australian classrooms. It is important that we ensure we are also teaching language comprehension skills. The focus of my day yesterday was on how we can effectively and systematically teach these skills.

Oral language is the foundation for all our literacy skills. It needs to be taught first and continuously. The stronger our oral language skills, then the stronger our reading & writing will be. After all, if you can't understand something when it's oral, then you won't understand it when it's written.

There is a clear emphasis on developing oral language skills in the early years. However, how much of this development is done in a  systematic way? And how do we know? 

"Weighing a pig won't help it grow, but what gets tested gets taught."

The importance of assessing oral language so that we actually know what we need to teach our students led to the creation of CUBED.  This (free) assessment is broken into 2 subtests that address the 2 factors of the simple view of reading.

1. Dynamic Decoding Measures assesses the word recognition side through measuring phonemic awareness, word identification, and decoding.​
2. Narrative Language Measures (NLM) focuses on students ability to comprehend and retell stories. This assessment has a listening measure (NLM:Listening) and a reading measure (NLM:Reading).

There's a flashy data management system that would make administration and reviewing the data very easy and painless.

I used NLM:Listening for the first time last year. I was impressed that I could assess of a child's comprehension without the need for the student to decode anything. It let me lift the lid on what the child understood without their decoding being a potential barrier.

There is a third version of CUBED about to be released. This edition will extend CUBED beyond the current K-Grade 3 offering up to 8th Grade. I am excited about what this will mean for assessing the comprehension of our upper primary students.

Weighing a pig is one thing but you need to know what to feed it to fatten it. This is where Story Champs fits in. To develop systematically oral language skills Story Champs combines 3 active ingredients:

1. Visual materials: Stories are told with cards with simple illustrations. Icons are placed on the illustrations to assist with telling and retelling. The scaffold of the visuals is quickly faded as responsibility for the retell shifts to the student. 
2. Structured stories:  There are 24 stories included. However, each story is rewritten with varying complexity (depending on the teaching focus) resulting in 144 story exemplars. Each story is designed to make the structure obvious to students. 
3. Teaching procedures: There are clear lesson plans to follow, written for whole class, small groups and 1:1. They are prescriptive enough while allowing flexibility. Names can be changed to more familiar ones and terms like 'candy bar' can be easily swapped to 'chocolate bar'.  

Story Champs aims to make the patterns of stories obvious. I saw this firsthand this morning when I went through a story with my 4yo. He quickly picked up how to retell the story and was then able to generate a personal story following the same pattern. 
The 7yo saw what was happening and so I chose a slightly more complex story and she just as quickly picked up on the pattern. She also added to her vocabulary along the way (tentatively, resolved, radiant). The 7yo even wrote down her personal story.

This week I am planning to use the CUBED NLM:Listening assessment with my class. I am looking forward to start using Story Champs. It will probably be once a week, with our read-alouds the other four days focusing on building background knowledge. I can also see the huge potential benefits for students in our intervention program in both small groups and 1:1.