Earobics

Earobics Literacy Launch was designed as a supplement to enhance and complement a school’s existing reading curriculum. Earobics Literacy Launch provides students help in developing the foundational skills to become successful readers. The primary goals of Earobics Literacy Launch is to give teachers effective strategies for teaching reading and to give students practice in developing key skills not found in the core curriculum through the combined use of software, teacher-directed activities, manipulatives and books.

This program consists of two major parts: Step 1 for first and second grade students, and Step 2 for second and third graders and older students who are struggling with fluency. The Earobics Literacy Launch program involves students working individually on developing phonemic awareness and phonics skills with Earobics software games that are highly engaging and automatically tailored to the skill level of each child. In small or large groups, teachers provide explicit instruction in language enrichment, phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondences, decoding, and early reading and writing through activities from the Teacher’s Resource: Classroom Connections.

Earobics Literacy Launch recommends that each student engage in a minimum of three 20-minute sessions weekly with the software and 25-30-minute sessions daily with teacher directed activities. All Earobics Literacy Launch games and activities can be woven into the Language Arts block of time by lesson plans that have been carefully customized to fit with the school’s core reading curriculum.

Strengths of Earobics Literacy Launch:

• The program includes motivating and engaging activities that are explicit and based on the five components of reading.

• Software activities in phonological awareness follow a developmental hierarchy.

• Data collection during software activities allows the teacher to view student and group progress, and provides the ability to adapt instruction based on performance.

• Strong professional development that is customized for each school is provided.

• Research that employs the use of control groups has been conducted and reported.

• Teachers learn useful strategies that can be applied to any core reading curriculum.

• Learning objectives are clearly stated for every activity.

• Research for this program show outcomes for a variety of students in urban as well as rural districts, at-risk students, students in general and special education, and ESOL students.

Weaknesses of Earobics Literacy Launch:

• None were noted.

Source: Florida Center for Reading Research