These lessons were developed originally for elementary-age students. The curriculum works very well for them, and it helps that they tend to be enthusiastic learners. It is important to get students reading as early as possible. Most students can and should be reading well before the end of first grade. Any reading difficulties should be resolved long before ninth grade, as this is when permanent school records start being kept. A student who is overcoming a reading deficit needs time to adjust his study habits and begin to fill in the knowledge and skill gaps that his inability to read may have caused in other disciplines (math, science, etc.). We want him to begin his high school years with everything in place for success.
Reading and Spelling Pure & Simple is equally valuable for teaching reading to teens, adults, and even ESL students. These older students usually show the most dramatic results. This curriculum is ideal for one-on-one instruction but is suitable also for small group lessons. Instructors who have used the lessons with more than one student at a time offer the following teaching tips.
The most effective use of these lessons, whether in a classroom or other setting, is when an adult works one-on-one with a student at least once a day for a minimum of twenty minutes.1 Naturally, a 1:1 student/teacher ratio is ideal. Group work is quite feasible, though. In one third-grade class, four students worked together through these lessons and improved their Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) reading scores two and three grade levels in only a few weeks. A student in Oklahoma improved from 1.6 (first grade, sixth month) to 3.2 (third grade, second month) in her SRI scores after working daily with a classroom aide for less than a month. We have seen this kind of dramatic improvement repeatedly, with consistent, daily, one-on-one or low-ratio student/adult instruction. If you do work with several students at a time, be sure that each one is getting adequate attention. Groupthink (relying on other students’ answers) is not acceptable. Each pupil should be pronouncing (reading) and spelling (on paper) with immediate corrections provided.
Enlist aides and volunteers to teach the lessons.
Many concerned citizens, including the parents and grandparents of students, are willing to volunteer their time to make a difference in school classrooms and in the lives of older teens and adults. Volunteers can be found in parent/teacher organizations, churches, libraries, social clubs, community centers, and senior citizens’ groups. Sometimes it is possible to get help from high school or college students who want to earn community leadership credit.
Our lessons can be administered daily with little prep time. Once a completion (progress) chart has been set up for the student and the person who will teach the lesson has read and understands the instructions, there is little administrative care, time, or attention needed from the lead classroom teacher. The lessons can be done in a corner of a classroom or in a school hallway, library nook, cafeteria, or wherever quiet space can be found. A quick glance at the completion chart tells the instructor which lesson is next. After that, it’s just a matter of following the instructions for each lesson and marking the completion chart. Individual students can even work with different instructors from day to day and be very successful.
“Drill” for automaticity.
Begin each group session by drilling one student on the words next to a chosen Roman numeral. Rotate to the next student. If the group will be reading materials other than what is presented in these lessons, for best results, the teacher should always begin with drills. After a lesson has been read, be sure to administer the spelling test.
Assign homework.
Homework can be assigned on a schedule set by the teacher. Encourage your students to read and spell through the assigned words with their parents, grandparents, an older sibling, etc. This assignment might be sent home on Friday with a follow-up spelling test being given on Monday.
Use peer tutors in the classroom.
Class members who make a 100 on their spelling tests might serve as peer tutors. Have the peer tutor call out spelling words for other students to write on paper. Peer tutoring reinforces the tutor’s own proficiency, and the struggling student gets to improve with the additional practice. One Caution: Administering the lessons solely through peer tutors, even daily, does not give the strongest results. Peer tutors younger than middle-school age often settle for less than mastery. Since each lesson builds upon the previous lessons, mastery is necessary.
Augment weekly spelling lists.
Most elementary classroom teachers give a weekly spelling test, usually featuring words from that week’s reading curriculum
or stories. Some spelling lists come from purchased spelling books or from lists of words determined by the school district. It is best if the words on the lists are organized along the lines of syllable patterns. A classroom teacher can use the word lists in this book to illustrate syllable and word patterns. For example, if the weekly spelling list (usually twenty words) has several words with a silent k, the teacher can further illustrate the silent k pattern by using the word list from Lesson 81, Roman numeral IV. This particular list features knot, knit, knob, knock, knees, know, knife, and knight.
Illustrate patterns with “word pictures.”
There is something very powerful about seeing a list of words following the same pattern. It’s like looking at a “word picture,” which will often help students recognize the pattern when they see it again. Check the Index of Letters and Sounds to locate specific patterns.
Start novice readers off right.
Beginning students must know the alphabet letters IN ORDER. Teaching “The Alphabet Song” is the most popular and effective way to teach the sequence of the letters (see, also, next instruction below).
It is CRITICAL, absolutely critical, that beginning students be told that we always read letters (and words) FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. Otherwise, the “soup” of letters that the students see cannot be formed into true, meaningful words. Starting on the first day of reading instruction, students must be taught that words are sounded out from left to right.
Typically, a kindergarten teacher introduces one alphabet letter a week. Creative ways are employed to teach each letter. Students practice printing the letter, use pictures to illustrate something about the letter, make collages, and so forth. A careful selecting of the order in which alphabet letters are introduced makes it possible to promote earlier-than-normal letter and sound recognition and speeds up the learning process. For example, if the first four letters that the teacher introduces are short vowel a and the consonants m, t, and b, students can immediately read am, at, mat, tat, and bat. If the next letters introduced are l, n, and p, students also can read Al, an, lab, lap, nap, man, tan, pal, pan, pat, map, and tap. As each alphabet letter is introduced, the universe of words increases greatly. Using forethought and strategy in selecting and introducing letters (as we have in our lessons) allows students’ reading and spelling vocabularies to blossom quickly. Furthermore, starting new readers with a true phonics curriculum like this one also means that students will not need to spend a full week learning each alphabet letter, as they will be learning letters in meaningful, non-abstract words from Day One. By stressing the need to pay attention to every letter, in left-to-right order, we achieve continuous use and practice for each letter.
Practice out loud.
Often, I’ve seen a kindergarten teacher, as part of her daily routine, point to a list of words and numbers on her wall and recite these with her students. Typically, these word lists are
The days of the week: “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday …”
The months of the year: “January, February, March, April …”
The numbers from one to twenty: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …”
The numbers from 1 to 100 [by one’s]: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 …”
The numbers from 5 to 100 [by five’s]: “5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 …”
The numbers from 10 to 100 [by ten’s]: “10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 …”
In the same fashion, the teacher can give opportunities to learn the sounds of individual letters and to practice the words out loud. For Lesson A [featuring letters a, m, t and b], a teacher can drill with “am, at, mat, tab, tat, bat . . . .” Of course, the goal is for students to truly read through the lists, not just recite words from memory.
The teacher can discuss or question the class about the meaning of the words being learned. She can place the words into sentences. This exercise can be used with every lesson.
Kindergarteners will be best served if their teacher introduces letters and their basic sounds exactly in the order we present them here. Only after the applicable letter sounds have been learned will the teacher present students with words that have those sounds. Start each lesson with a reminder that words are read and spelled (always!) from left to right. We require that you use a pencil to focus attention on the left side of each word. Again, we want real reading, not guesswork or word memorization.
Sentence rules and structure may be discussed at opportune times during the lessons.
When students are taught, from the very beginning, to read and spell from left to right, many potential learning problems are avoided. The orderly introduction of words and patterns provides an excellent opportunity for additional instruction, such as mentioning sentence rules and structure. Early on, students will be taught the letters that comprise the name Sam (a proper noun) and the word sat (a verb, a word showing action). It is possible to make a complete sentence using these two words: “Sam sat.” In addition to having a sentence like “Sam sat,” it is also possible to have the query, “Sam sat?” The teacher can explain to her students that every sentence must have at least one subject, in this case Sam, and at least one verb, in this case sat. A sentence must express a complete thought. Also, the teacher may want to mention that a sentence always begins with a capital letter (S in Sam) and that it ends with some kind of punctuation (a period, question mark, or other terminal punctuation mark). Essentially, the teacher can instruct her students in sentence structure along the way.
Consider using this curriculum for reading intervention.
Education nomenclature changes from year to year, but the need for intervention methods and materials is constant. These 90 lessons will be helpful for Response to Intervention (RTI) instruction, tiers 1, 2, and 3.
Suggested Enrichment Activities
After your students complete a lesson, provide them with enrichment activities to reinforce the basic skills. Here are some suggestions.
1.
Read aloud the definition of a word from a lesson. Ask your students to say which word it is. This game playing can also be done with incomplete sentences (“fill in the blank”) or with questions. The answers can be chosen by the students, if not from the lesson list, then from selected words on an overhead, blackboard, or handout sheet
or from word choices read aloud by the teacher. Have your students spell their answers on paper. The teacher might say:
“This is a primary color. Santa is dressed from head to ankles in this color.” (red)
“When tired, you might __________ on a chair to rest.” (sit)
“What do we call the shelf found at the bottom of a window?” (a sill)
2.
Provide your students with a list of nouns and a list of verbs from which to form sentences. Give points for the capitalizing of the first word in a sentence and any proper nouns. Give points for having each sentence end with an appropriate punctuation mark (a period, exclamation, or question mark). Give points for having proper sentence structure and word order (syntax). Later in this curriculum, students will have learned other parts of speech—prepositions, adjectives, conjunctions, pronouns, and adverbs—any of which they can incorporate into their sentences. Remember, these are not words to be memorized. These are words that are mastered in accordance with learned structures.
NOUNS:
Sam
Jim
Bill
Jill
VERBS:
sat
can run
will nap
did sit
can sit
POSSIBLE SENTENCES MADE FROM THESE WORDS:
Sam sat. Will Bill nap?
Jill can run. Did Jim sit?
Can Jim run? Will Jill run?
Bill will nap. Sam will run.
Sam can sit. Run, Bill, run!
3.
Ask students to write a poem or a few lines that rhyme, using words from the lessons.
4.
Instruct students to use a dictionary to identify whether words are nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, or adverbs. Then have your student use these words to form sentences, paragraphs, or even whole stories.
5.
Teach your students how to diagram a sentence. This is a phenomenal skill for them to acquire. Focus on how the parts of speech function, on the need for subject/verb agreement, and on being consistent with verb tenses.
6.
Consider the orderly introduction of other disciplines when using these lessons. Consider, for example, geography and map work. One exercise might be to obtain a generic map of the United States of America with states outlined, but no state names included. After your students complete Lesson 89 (by which time they will have learned all the pronunciation patterns for the 50 states of the United States), have them label each state. Next have them insert the name of the capital city and major cities in the states. Credit would be given for proper location and correct spelling. One year, when I was teaching high school American History, I spent about ten minutes at the beginning of each class testing my students using the above activity. Those who achieved a 100 had a few minutes of free time or they could use that time to tutor students who had not yet obtained a perfect score. It took only those few minutes for a little more than a week for all the students to obtain an A. It helped us start the year with a working knowledge of the United States and provided an opportunity for students to realize the importance of studying and reviewing for success.
1 One twelve-year-old, fifth-grade student (he had been retained once) worked on our lessons with an adult instructor for about thirty minutes a day for three weeks. Prior to using our lessons, he had scored a zero (0) on the Scholastic Reading Inventory test. After he completed Lesson 19, his SRI score jumped to a 364.5 (second grade). After completing Lesson 40, he scored 804 (sixth grade) on his next SRI test. On May 3 he scored 921 and was considered to be on grade level. When he took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test (TAKS), he comfortably passed both math and reading (he had not been successful with either section of the TAKS before).