6 Levels of the Reading Foundation
Each program runs for 12 weeks, twice a week for 45 minutes. They are designed to fit together, meet the kids at their exact levels, and rapidly fix their knowledge gaps.
The Seeds (pre-K/K level)
For students who need to develop letter/sound recognition and beginning phonemic awareness skills.
The sprouts (K level)
For students who have letter/sound recognition but need to develop their phonemic awareness to begin blending sounds before they start our Roots level.
The Roots (1st grade level)
Just like a tree, students need to have a solid reading foundation to build upon! In The Roots they learn short vowel sounds, blending CVC words, digraphs & initial and final consonant blends.
The Climb (2nd grade level)
The Climb starts off where we left in Roots. Students are still working with short vowel sounds and now adding trigraphs to the beginning of a word, glued sounds, R-controlled vowels, word endings, and silent e.
The Missing Link (3rd grade level)
The Missing Link works on truly unlocking the code of our language for students who are solid with the skills taught in Roots & Climb. We explicitly teach the 25 vowel teams - what do they sound like, when do we use them, how do we spell with them, what are the rules? Next we introduce the 6 syllable types - students learn how to break multisyllablic words into single syllables and learn how to pronounce each syllable based on the vowel sounds in each syllable. This gives them the understanding of how to confidently attack bigger and unfamiliar words.
Reading Comprehension & Fluency Workshop (3rd grade and beyond)
Now that our students are strong decoders, (or if an incoming student assesses as a strong decoder but struggles with fluency and comprehension), they can take the energy they were using to decode each word on the page and focus it on deriving meaning from what they are reading! This class focuses on building fluency and prosody, and introduces comprehension strategies including prediction, inference, making connections, plot/setting/characters, and answering questions about the text.