Reading Programs

Calvert County special education teachers use a variety of reading programs to assist students in gaining skills in decoding, phonetic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.  Below you will find a short description of the programs currently in use, as well as lessons and activities  suggested by our teachers.  Each month, teachers from selected schools will add their ideas to the list.  Check this page frequently for additions from showcased schools!

Corrective Reading - Provides intervention for students in Grades 3 - Adult who are reading below grade level. This program delivers tightly sequenced, scripted planned lessons that give struggling students the structure and practice necessary to become fluent readers. This program uses Direct Instruction methodology. It has two major components that are separate programs - Decoding and Comprehension.

Fundations® -  is a phonological/phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling program based upon the Orton-Gillingham principles and serves as a prevention program to help reduce reading and spelling failure. Teachers incorporate a daily Fundations™ lesson into their language arts classroom instruction. The lessons focus on carefully sequenced skills that include print knowledge, alphabet awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and spelling. Critical thinking, speaking and listening skills are practiced during Story Time activities. 

Great Leaps - provides a systematic presentation of materials on sound awareness, letter recognition and phonics high-frequency words and phrases, and stories so that the average reading when proficient, will complete the page in exactly one minute or less with few or no errors.  This program supplements the teachers' ongoing reading program to improve the reading fluency and achievement of students.

LiPS® - The Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing® (LiPS®) Program (formerly called the ADD Program, Auditory Discrimination in Depth) successfully stimulates phonemic awareness.    Individuals become aware of the mouth actions which produce speech sounds.  This awareness becomes the means of verifying sounds within words and enables individuals to become self-correcting in reading and spelling, and speech. (see disclaimer at bottom of page)
 

Phonics Boost is a reading intervention that consists of 80 lessons.  The primary focus of the lessons is phonemic awareness, phonics concepts, and essential word-attack skills.  

Phonics Blitz is a reading intervention consisting of 50 lessons that focus on phonemeic awareness, phonics concepts, and essential word-attack skills. Although Phonics Boost and Blitz are similar in structure, activities and goals, Phonics Blitz is faster paced with less review and practice than Phonics Boost.

REWARDS Multi-syllabic Word Reading is a research-based and validated short term reading intervention. The program introduces students to a unique multisyllabic word reading strategy. This strategy has been proven to be effective in helping students break words into manageable decodable chunks, read long words in content area textbooks, and increase oral and silent reading fluency.

REWARDS Plus is a follow-up program for students who have completed REWARDS but continue to need more practice and application using science and social studies passages.

Six Minute Solution is a reading fluency program that quickly builds fluency through interactive, peer-to-peer repeated readings. Readers gain fluency first at the word level and then at the passage level.  This program consists of a primary level, an intermediate level and a secondary level.

SRA Reading Mastery - uses the Direct Instruction method to develop phonics skills through carefully sequenced, explicit instruction in sound-symbol correspondences and an emphasis on blending the sounds.  Reading Mastery is unique in its use of a different orthography with lower case letters only.  This allows the program to limit its system to 40 sound-symbol correspondences and minimizes common errors such as b/d reversals. Higher levels of Reading Mastery focus on phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
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Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking® - is a strategy based intervention program to improve oral and written language comprehensions. The program helps students create an imaged "whole" or "gestalt".  Verbalization with visualization is taught in order to develop concept imagery needed for comprehension.  (see disclaimer at bottom of page)

Wilson Reading System - is a research-based reading and writing program. It is a complete curriculum for teaching decoding and encoding (spelling) beginning with phoneme segmentation. WRS directly teaches the structure of words in the English language so that students master the coding system for reading and spelling. Unlike other programs that overwhelm the student with rules, the language system of English is presented in a systematic and cumulative manner so that it is manageable. It provides an organized, sequential system with extensive controlled text to help teachers implement a multi-sensory structured language program.  The basic purpose of the Wilson Reading System is to teach students fluent decoding and encoding skills to the level of mastery. From the beginning steps of the program, it also includes sight word instruction, vocabulary, oral expressive language development and comprehension. Throughout the program, a ten part lesson plan, designed to be very interactive between teacher and student, is followed. The lessons progress from easier to more challenging tasks for decoding and spelling. The lesson plan ends with fluency and comprehension work.