Measuring Student Improvement and Dealing with Skeptics

By this lesson, many students will demonstrate gains in their reading ability in the classroom or work environment. Just requiring a student to read and spell from left to right will greatly help. Many students will recognize the progress in themselves. This advancement is not always apparent to others, however. Comments from people who are skeptical of your student’s progress may discourage you and your pupil. Rest assured that discernible, measurable improvement, if not already apparent, is just a few lessons away.

Your student has not yet been shown the phonics patterns for such everyday words as helped, printed, open, story, point, boy, count, turn, first, word, percent, example, and put. Nor has he acquired the tools for pronouncing sign, hour, answer, science, half, money, they, learn, usual, telephone, decision, or book. While some perceptive students might figure out these words without having been introduced to their patterns, most will not. This is why it is important to finish ALL of the lessons in this book! Missing a few patterns can handicap a student. You are currently more than halfway through the program. Thus far, this curriculum has covered only the short- and long-vowel syllable patterns that appear in a great many English words. Stay with us—the best is yet to come!Some students will still try to “guess” read. The bouncing back and forth between these tightly controlled lessons (with their strong insistence on patterns) and outside reading assignments (with no such controls and many patterns not yet learned) can derail your student’s progress as a pattern reader. Here are some strategies for compensating:

1. Remind your student—every time you start your lesson work—to read from left to right and apply the patterns he has learned. Encourage him to concentrate on the letters in the words in order.
2. Try to make one of our lessons the first activity of the day or of the reading instruction period. Do our lessons before any other reading is done. If your student
   must encounter outside reading, consider having the teacher read the outside material to him. We don’t want your student having to switch between words whose patterns he knows and words whose patterns he has not yet learned. We want to keep him in the part of the brain that involves pattern reading.
3. Always support your student, no matter what he is reading. When he encounters patterns he has not yet learned, either tell him what the pattern is or mention that he will be learning it soon.
4. Strive to have at least one lesson a day.

I – VI PRACTICE all of the words. Read, comprehend, and spell. Mark the chart.