Reading Intervention

Depending on the severity of a child's reading issues, intervention may require at minimum 2 and up to 5, 60-minute sessions a week. Initial assessment results help me identify areas of need and program placement. Sessions may include remediation in some or all of the following: phonemic awareness, decoding (phonics), vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Most programs also include a strong encoding (spelling) component.

Factors that influence the amount of time needed to close the gap:

Intervention intensity (frequency, session length, consistency)
Student deficits (how far behind are they)
Student attention & memory (how long can they attend, how focused are they, and how well do they retain information)
Access to a quiet setting with minimal distractions, comfortable seating, and lesson materials

Using previous test data and academic records, I will select assessments that help me identify what knowledge and skills the student needs to develop. Possible assessments include components of the: CTOPP, TOWRE, WADE, CORE Multiple Measures, DIBELS reading passages, and/or a passage from a grade level chapter book. Using the results of these measures, I identify which programs to use and where to start.

After twenty years of teaching reading, I’ve come to find that most programs don’t work for all students. Some programs require more intensive phonemic awareness components, others move too slowly for students to make adequate progress, and some don’t do enough to develop orthographic mapping skills required for reading fluency. As a result, I find myself often selecting a base program based on initial test results and pulling from other research-based programs to supplement. I am trained in the following phonics programs: Lindamood Bell Seeing Stars, Wilson, Corrective Reading, and Really Good Reading. Along the way, I have been taught how to use instructional techniques from LETRS, LMB LiPS, The Barton System, Orton-Gillingham, SPIRE, and SRA Reading Recovery. For phonemic awareness, I use The Intensive Phonological Awareness Program, Rode to the Code, Chaining and felt activities from Seeing Stars, and 1-min PA drills from Dave Kilpatrick. For vocabulary instruction, I pull from Bringing Words to Life, Worldly Wise, Word Wisdom, and/or Vocabulary from Classical Roots. For fluency, we focus on developing word level decoding, phrase fluency, sentence fluency, and passage level fluency. Most fluency instruction happens through improving a student’s decoding skills. Additionally, I engage students in repeated readings, timed reading, choral reading (we read together), and recorded reading (they record themselves and use a rubric to score and provide feedback).

Reading comprehension often benefits from working on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and fluency skills. When focusing directly on reading comprehension, I tend to start with checking to see how well a student visualizes while they read. If a student needs support in this area (most students do), I start them out using grade level Visualize and Verbalize workbooks working at developing at the sentence, multi-sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph levels. I also work with students on breaking sentences into meaningful parts and understanding how those parts modify one another. If we are working on analyzing expository text features, I will pull passages from science or social studies books, or from online articles on a topic of interest to the student. If we are working on vocabulary, I may use passages from Wordly Wise or Word Wisdom to additionally work on other comprehension skills. For narrative text, I teach students how to engage with the text and track story elements through text marking and graphic organizers, and general before, during, and after reading strategies to support student comprehension.

Find a list of programs used on the Overview page.