All PHPS students receive daily Heggerty instruction for 10-15 minutes. Lessons are designed to provide daily instruction in eight phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Students practice blending, segmenting, and manipulating words, syllables, and phonemes each day. The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. (Adams, 1990) With Heggerty, students receive daily practice in both. This explicit instruction scaffolds support for students to work with early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills. With daily lessons, students are able to build the necessary foundation to become automatic decoders of print.
SIPPS® is a foundational skills program that helps students learn to read.
In SIPPS Beginning Level, your child focuses on the alphabetic principle. They learn concepts of print, gain phonological awareness (especially blending and segmentation), and learn initial phonics (consonants, consonant digraphs, and short vowels) and high-frequency words. Throughout Beginning Level, your child reads decodable books that match the instruction. By the end of this level, your child will understand and use short vowels, know 75 high-frequency words, and be able to read and spell new words.
In SIPPS Extension Level, your child will focus on spelling patterns. They will deepen their phonological awareness (with an emphasis on segmentation and manipulation) and learn phonics (beginning with consonant blends and final e, then moving on to more complex vowel patterns) as well as high-frequency words. By the middle of the level, your child will be able to read simple trade books. By the end of this level, your child will be able to read single-syllable words with complex vowels and more than 150 high-frequency words.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach and the SIPPS Program