I super puffy heart LLI!

At our school, we use Fountas & Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) with our Tier 2 kiddos and I love, Love, LOVE it!

There are six systems I think: The super primary readers start in the Orange system, then move up to Green, followed by Blue, Red, Gold and Purple is about to be released. At our school, we have all but purple, which is all we really need for kinder through fifth graders.

We house all the systems in our office. Now that we have shelving our office looks so much better, and we created a small space to hold a group!

LLI is awesome because each day, kids get high quality books to read. The kits are complete with a book a day, running records provided for every other lesson, a teacher lesson guide, a resource repository online to print any docs you need, word study (with notebooks), test prep...it goes on and on!

Here's our green system along the top of this shelving:

You have to do lots of organizing, but once you do it's so easy to use. Here is the green system, with materials for lessons 16-41.

Each day, there is lots to do. I only see my group for 35-40 minutes, so I have to pick and choose. I always do word study and then we might do a quick close read of part of the previous night's book, and then I intro the new book. Here's a few of the books we've read recently:

Beauty's New Beak is about an eagle who lost her beak. Then, and engineer designed her a new one. The nonfiction books in the LLI systems are complete with all the great text features students will read: table of contents, glossaries, sidebars, drawings and photographs with captions...and on and on. I was looking at one of the books the other day and there was an appendix in it!

Also, the books are all of high quality topics. We read a book a few weeks ago about a lady who designed clicker training for dogs. I was so interested I googled her, and there she was on google! When I get my next dog, you can bet I'm going to use her training methods!

Here's the book we read yesterday:

Another great thing about LLI is that the books will stick with a topic but teach it in a different way. The day after Beauty's New Beak, we got this book, Calling All Birds, which was functional text about three projects kids could make to attract birds to their yards. (Perfect that it was sent home on a long weekend in spring!)

The kids were so excited to read this book. I swear, I didn't have her pose for this pic...she just looked over and showed me the super cute pic of the bird in the bird bath at the exact moment I snapped the pic:

LLI is great because of the repetition. The kids get a book a night and the books go through all the genres. We've read realistic fiction, fantasy, biography, memoir, traditional literature, nonfiction...the genres are all mixed up and the kids are never bored of the books. The nonfiction has very engaging topics: strange museums, crazy looking animals, and yesterday, step-by-step directions in creating bird projects:

So cool, right?

LLI is so expensive, but so worth it. My kids are making progress in their reading. In fact, it was awesome when I was talking with their homeroom teachers about one of the students. The teacher said, "I've noticed that B is doing so well adjusting her voice to the dialog of characters and even changing her voices to match the characters she's reading. I've noticed real improvement!"

I was on cloud 9. In our group, I had given her that exact feedback when we were reading aloud, so it's great to see that it's transferring elsewhere. She's developing great reading habits!

Anyways, if you have money for intervention and you want a great product, I *highly* recommend Leveled Literacy Intervention!

Who else uses LLI? What other interventions do you use? Please share with me!

Have a fab weekend - hope it's a long one like our four day!