Reading

There are three courses of Reading Intervention at EJD - Road to Reading, Rewards, and Reading/Writing. Students may be placed in one of these courses based on their individual needs.

A. Road to Reading: The Road to Reading curriculum is for students who struggle with phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, accurate and fluent word recognition, as well as reading fluency. The Road to Reading curriculum emphasizes explicit, systematic, scientifically-based literacy instruction.

Road to Reading provides an overview of the structure of the English language by introducing the six syllable patterns and the most common phonetic elements (Blachman & Tangel, 2008).

The program follows a daily 5-step Plan:

1. Reviewing sound-symbol correspondences - In the first step students will review sound-symbol associations and will be introduced to new sounds.

2. Teaching or reviewing new decoding skills - This next step includes practicing making words to develop a new decoding skill, as well as reinforcing both phonemic awareness and phonics skills.

3. Review phonetically regular words and high-frequency words - Students review previously learned phonetically regular words and high-frequency words, with an emphasis on fluency and opportunities to extend vocabulary knowledge. 

4. Reading orally in context - Students practice their new decoding skills through reading orally both narrative and expository texts for fluency and comprehension growth.

5. Dictation - Students practice spelling words from earlier steps within each lesson.

B. Rewards: Rewards is a research-validated specialized reading curriculum for those struggling to decode longer, multisyllabic words. Students gain competency in decoding, fluency, and vocabulary through the systematic application of explicit instruction, and the gradual release of responsibility leading to greater reading independence (Archer, 2014).

Students will: 

• Apply the REWARDS strategies to decode previously unknown multisyllabic words containing two to eight-word parts.

• Accurately read more multisyllabic words found in grade-level science, social studies, and health textbooks, as well as other classroom materials. 

• Expand their general academic and domain-specific vocabulary.

• Read narrative and informational text, more accurately and at a more appropriate rate.

• Experience increased comprehension as their decoding accuracy, reading rate, vocabulary knowledge, and familiarity with text-dependent comprehension questions increase.

• Accurately spell more multisyllabic grade-level words. (Archer, 2014)

https://www.voyagersopris.com/products/reading/rewards/intermediate-secondary

C. Reading/Writing: Reading/Writing class focuses on four major areas - Fluency, Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension and Writing. 

• Fluency: Fluency is the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression (Rasinski, 2006). Fluency is an important reading skill that is crucial in the understanding of text. If students are not fluent readers, they are unable to fully comprehend the text, as they are more focused on decoding the individual words. Being able to read fluently leads to improved reading comprehension, therefore, fluency strategies and activities are built into our daily classwork, where students have the opportunity to practice reading texts of various lengths and genres.

• Vocabulary: Vocabulary instruction in Reading/Writing class focuses on roots and affixes, academic vocabulary, and vocabulary in context. Root and affix instruction gives students the tools to decipher unknown words by knowing the meanings of the root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Academic vocabulary consists of words that students will encounter in all content areas throughout the school, as well as on various assessments. Finally, vocabulary in context refers to the practice of looking for clues in the text to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words.

• Reading Comprehension: Students will be provided ample opportunities to practice reading and comprehending texts, both fiction and nonfiction. They will be taught several strategies to help increase their understanding of a text such as using context clues, breaking up larger readings into smaller pieces and summarizing, annotating text, and finding evidence to support their answers to comprehension questions.

• Writing: At the fifth-grade level, students will be utilizing the Rewards Writing program. This program provides explicit instruction and focused practice on skills that intermediate and secondary students need to write more sophisticated sentences and paragraphs. The three areas of focus are on sharpening their word choices within a writing piece, polishing sentences to increase sentence complexity and variety, and editing paragraphs. 

https://www.voyagersopris.com/products/writing/rewards-writing

For all other grade levels, The Writing Revolution will be implemented for writing instruction. The Writing Revolution provides teachers with an evidence-based and proven instructional methodology, the Hochman Method. The methodology rests on explicit, carefully sequenced instruction, building from sentences to compositions. The Hochman Method is not a separate writing curriculum but rather an approach designed to be adapted to and embedded in the content being taught in any subject area and at any grade level.

https://www.thewritingrevolution.org/method/