This is designed to take students through the Reading Horizons program in six weeks to get an overview of skills.
Day 1: Review all alphabet sounds with students and make sure they have them mastered, especially the vowel sounds. Introduce Voiced and Voiceless and talk about the concept of a slide. (Lessons 2, 5, 7, 9, and 10) Day 2: Review sounds and slides and teach Spelling with C and K, Lesson 11. Teach Building Words, Lesson 3 and Nonsense Words, Lesson 4. Day 3: Review Building Words and Nonsense Words and teach the L-Blends, Lesson 15. Day 5: Review previous skills and teach Special Vowel Combinations, Lesson 17.
Day 1: Review Special Vowel Combinations and teach R-Blends, Lesson 18. Day 2: Review R-Blends and teach S-Blends, Lesson 21 Day 3: Review all blends and teach Two Extra Blends, Lesson 22. Day 4: Teach Short and Long Vowels, Lesson 23, and Phonetic Skill 1, Lesson 24. Day 5: Review Phonetic Skill 1 and teach Phonetic Skill 2, Lesson 25, and Adding Suffixes to Phonetic Skills 1 and 2, Lesson 28.
Day 1: Teach Phonetic Skill 3, Lesson 30 and Phonetic Skill 4, Lesson 31. Day 2: Review Phonetic Skills 3 and 4 and teach Adding Suffixes to Phonetic Skills 3 and 4, Lesson 33 Day 3: Teach Another Sound for C and G, Lesson 32, and Phonetic Skill 5, Lesson 35. Day 4: Review Another Sound for C and G and Phonetic Skill 5. Teach Adding Suffixes to Phonetic Skill 5, Lesson 36. Day 5: Review all Phonetic Skills and blends if needed.
Day 1: Teach Many Mobs of Y, Lesson 38. Day 2: Review Jobs of Y and teach Decoding Skill 1, Lesson 39, and Last Job of Y, Lesson 41. Day 3: Review Decoding Skill 1 and teach Decoding Skill 2, Lesson 42. Day 4: Review both Decoding Skills and teach –LE at the End of a word. Day 5: Review and teach Decoding Words of Any Length, Lesson 45.
Day 1: Teach Murmur Diphthongs AR and OR, Lessons 47 and 48. Day 2: Review Murmur Diphthongs AR and OR and teach Murmur Diphthongs ER, UR, and IR, Lesson 49. Day 3: Review all Murmur Diphthongs and teach Digraphs CH, SH, WH, and TH, Lesson 51. Day 4: Review first 5 digraphs and teach More Digraphs, PH, GN, KN, CK, and WR, Lesson 52. Day 5: Review all Murmur Diphthongs and Digraphs. Teach Digraph Blends, Lesson 53 if time and if you want.
Day 1: Teach Special Vowel Sounds AU/AW, OU/OW, OI/OY, Lesson 55. Day 2: Review SVS AU/AW, OU/OW, OI/OY and teach Special Vowel Sounds OO (look) and OO (zoo), Lesson 56. Day 3: Review SVS and teach More Special Vowel Sound Skills, Lesson 57. Day 4: Other Suffixes, Lesson 58. Day 5: Review skills needed and/or Practice Multi-Syllabic Words, Lesson 60.
Give a quick review of the skills taught the day before, and connect it to the new information.
Model the new concept with explicit, visual instruction. Think out loud. For some students this information may be a review and for others it will be pre-teaching depending on what lesson they are on in the software.
Students are given a concrete, hands-on experience with the new concept, with teacher guidance. This is accomplished through dictation, the use of RLCs, and other group activities
What have we learned? How can we use this?
Students practice the skills learned, independent of teacher or peer guidance.
Remind students to pay attention to words that follow the skill(s) taught as they read. Teach students how to apply the four Transfer Skills.
Helping Students Transfer These Skills to Reading: Why do some students who are able to decode single words still have trouble reading? Students with processing issues handle the page the same way they handle words, as an overall picture. It is not clear to them that the “whole” is made up of parts—words and sentences. Because they do not know how to handle the page, they revert to compensation strategies of whole-word recognition and guessing. How do we help these students? There are four steps that can help students transfer their decoding strategies into fluent reading. The instruction of these steps needs to be explicit and visual.
Step #1: Students should use a finger to track while they are reading. Step #2: Have students sound out each word, tracking left to right, without stopping or guessing. Step #3: Teach the students explicitly how to apply decoding strategies to unfamiliar or difficult words. Step #4: Once students have applied decoding strategies and have figured out the sounds of the word, they should sound it out again, from left to right.
Result: Teaching students these four simple steps empowers them with the tools to make them independent readers.