Programs We Use
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.
Instruction develops the foundational skills students need in order to become proficient readers, including letter-sound relationships, phonemic and phonological awareness, high frequency word recognition, and phonics and spelling skills. Instruction develops students’ decoding skills, reading fluency, and ability to understand what they read.
Wilson directly and systematically teaches students how to fluently and accurately decode. It is unlike traditional phonics programs in that instruction is very interactive and multisensory. It also thoroughly teaches total word construction not just phonics. Students learn to encode (spell) as they learn to decode. The Wilson system was originally written for adults with dyslexia. It is appropriate for elementary students who have not internalized sounds and word structure.
Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LiPS)
LiPS focuses directly on the development and integration of phonemic awareness with sound-symbol knowledge and the sequencing of those relationships. This program enables students of all ages to understand the identity, number, and order of phonemes (sounds) in syllables and words through an oral/motor, visual, and auditory feedback system.