Great Leaps Reading

Great Leaps Reading uses proven instructional tactics with powerful motivators to remediate a variety of reading problems. Efficient in both cost and time expenditure, Great Leaps Reading is widely implemented across the country. Students with reading problems have responded with significant gains.

Students work individually with an instructor and the materials for less than ten minutes per day (three days per week minimum). Depending on the severity of the reading problem, one to two school years is the average length on intervention.

Great Leaps is divided into three major areas: (1) Phonics: developing and mastering essential sight-sound relationships and/or sound awareness skills; (2) Sight Phrases:mastering sight words while developing and improving focusing skills; and (3) Reading Fluency:using age-appropriate stories specifically designed to build reading fluency, reading motivation, and proper intonation.

The Phonics takes students from identifying sounds in isolation to being able to sound out cvc, cvcc, and cvce patterns. This enables students to (with contextual clues) decode unknown words with a high degree of success.

The Sight Phrases uses phrases to teach sight words while significantly increasing focusing skills. Teaching high frequency words in isolation has not worked for most students with reading problems. The Great Leaps approach of using sight phrases helps to minimize the age old problems of readers continuously missing words such as these, them, of, off, from, etc. Great Leaps was the first major published program to actively use “sight phrases” for the express purpose of sight (high frequency) word generalization.

The stories have been designed and written by Kenneth Campbell to not only significantly increase reading fluency, but also motivate students to want to continue reading. Use of point of view, humor, rhyme, and rhythm all contribute to a powerful fluency-building intervention.

As students achieve goals in each area of concern, they advance to a more challenging next step. For the first time in their lives, many students begin experiencing consistent reading success.

Great Leaps Reading has been researched and used successfully in schools across the country. Great Leaps has the support of special education and reading specialists in many universities. One of the differences of Great Leaps is that decisions have been built into the materials, allowing parents, volunteers, and classroom assistants (as well as professional staff) to successfully implement current research-based practices.

Although the appearance and strategies appear simple, Great Leaps has its origins in over thirty years of instructional research and practice from the world of precision assessment and teaching.

Areas that have implemented the Great Leaps Reading Program (from New York City to Seattle) have shown similar results. At-risk and dysfunctional readers are learning to read - many in a short period of time. (Approximately 25% of the students presently surveyed showed two to five years of oral reading growth in less than six months!)