My students are struggling readers in a small, rural community. About 50 percent of the children in our school are from low-income families. I teach over 50 students each day in our reading intervention program. Although our students have been fortunate enough to attend school in-person this year and last, many of them are still suffering from being out of the classroom due to COVID-19 in early 2020. We as teachers are trying to play "catch-up" with many younger students who failed to learn key reading skills during the distance learning period.
Recent brain research and the science of reading tell us that students learn to read best through a phonics-based approach.
Decodable readers are an important part of this type of reading instruction. Unfortunately, our school does not have many resources of this type to use in our reading intervention program.
My Project
Students at Enterprise Elementary are taught phonics skills in a systematic, explicit way. In our reading interventions, we are trying to give the students practice with words they can access on their own, using the phonics and high frequency word knowledge they have already acquired.
Intervention students need plenty of opportunities to decode words in books and other connected text.
If too many of the words in a book are not decodable using the rules they have learned, students learn that the only ways to "read" those words is to ask someone to tell them or to simply guess. The Primary Phonics book sets will give students reading material to use at school and at home which will fit their skill level. These books will reinforce good decoding habits and skills.
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