A few years ago, Congress gave the National Reading Panel a special commission: to determine the best approach to teach children to read. Their research was based on over 100,000 reading research studies published since 1966.
Among the panel’s findings was overwhelming evidence strongly supporting the concept that explicitly and systematically teaching phonics in the classroom significantly improves students’ reading and spelling skills. If teachers learn about and emphasize methods that provide phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text development, the incidents of reading success should increase dramatically.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words and is the knowledge that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words.
Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself teaches students to recognize the name, sound, and formation (both upper- and lowercase) of each letter. Through daily practice, drill, and review, the method can be mastered in a very short time. The alphabet is presented in sets of four consonants and one vowel each. In the first set, for example, students learn the name, sound, and formation of the consonants B, D, F, and G. Then the first vowel, A, is presented, and students learn to join or "slide" from the consonant to the vowel, blending the sounds together.
The next four consonants are then taught and incorporated in the dictation process until the student is reading and spelling with eight consonants while still focusing on the vowel A. Then the vowel E is introduced, and the student is taught to "slide" from the eight learned consonants to the vowel E. They can now spell and read with eight consonants and two vowels. This process continues through the entire alphabet.
Reverse Listening Cards, provided in the Teacher’s Kit, reverse the listening process used during dictation and make it a reading process. The cards provide students with additional practice and ensure independent growth. Games and activities are used to reinforce concepts in phoneme isolation, identification, categorization, blending, and segmenting as well phoneme addition, subtraction, and substitution.
Phonics is the relationship between the graphemes (letters) of written language and the phonemes (individual sounds) of spoken language. Readers use these relationships to recognize familiar words and to decode unfamiliar words.
Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself employs a unique marking system that allows students to visualize the relationship between the sounds they hear and the letters they see. Following the introduction of the alphabet and blends, the student is introduced to the Five Phonetic Skills that are based on the predictable pattern structure of the English language and are used later in the course to determine syllables, empowering students with the ability to decode words of any length.
By actively marking words in every lesson, students learn to recognize likely and unlikely sequencing, and they can read, spell, and pronounce unfamiliar words with a high degree of confidence and accuracy.
Fluency is the capacity to read text accurately and quickly, either silently or orally.
Fluency is a natural outcome of the Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself course. The blending and sliding process, taught early in the course, helps students avoid breaking words into individual sounds when pronounced. Students are taught to pronounce words smoothly, left to right.
Studies have shown that the ability to read long words fluently depends on a student’s ability to break words into syllables (segmenting). The unique marking system employed in this approach easily accomplishes this goal. Focus is not limited to single words, however, and students may practice with sentences of connected text, as well. Every lesson also includes suggested reading lists for additional practice in oral and silent reading skills.
Comprehension is the ability to understand, remember, and communicate meaning from what has been read.
Because instruction in phonemic awareness improves children’s ability to read words, it also improves their reading comprehension. For children to understand what they read, they must be able to read words rapidly and accurately, which allows them to focus their attention on content and meaning.
A large part of a student’s desire to read is based upon his or her ability to do so. Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself empowers students with that ability. Studies show that students who were taught Discover Intensive Phonics in kindergarten and in first grade have achieved consistently higher reading scores than students who were not taught with this method.
Vocabulary development focuses on the words one must know to communicate effectively.
As soon as the word bag is taught in section one of the Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself course, students learn that bag can have several meanings and can be used as a noun or verb. Almost every word dictated in the course is used in a context sentence.
Students work actively with words used both in and out of context. They are given repeated exposure to new words and are encouraged to use those words as they engage in daily writing exercises. Additionally, they learn sentence structure, interrogative and declarative sentences, prefixes and suffixes, contractions, homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms. Attention is also given to word origin.
The No Child Left Behind Act focuses on accountability. Each state has strong standards for what every child in grades 3-8 should know, especially in reading. Every student’s progress and achievement is measured on a yearly basis. Results from testing are available to the public, and schools are held accountable for performance standards.
Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself empowers teachers with the tools they need to teach reading. Teachers can attend a one-day, hands-on Discover Intensive Phonics training session; implement the program into their classroom reading curriculum; and, in a short amount of time, see the reading skills of all of their students significantly increase. The impact of Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself is felt in all subject areas.
This explicit, systematic phonics instruction will also enhance students’ listening and communicating skills, boosting confidence and self-esteem. As the program’s author, Charlotte Lockhart, stated: “You are developing security, confidence, independence, and comprehension. You are encouraging cooperation, courtesy, and respect for others. You are lifting the self-image and giving your student a feeling of security.”
With the implementation of the Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself foundation for reading, teachers will be equipped to help every child meet his or her state’s performance standards.
The No Child Left Behind Act puts money into the hands of America’s disadvantaged students with a goal of closing the achievement gap between rich and poor, majority and minority groups, learning disabled and non-disabled students, and native English speakers and ESL/ESOL students.
Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself is a program that helps every child but is especially helpful to students who struggle: the learning disabled student, the dyslexic student, the low-level reader, and the student learning English as an additional language.
Because Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself is taught through direct, multi-sensory instruction, every learning modality is employed. Each student is addressed through his or her unique learning style, whether it is audio, visual, tactile, or kinesthetic. The method can be taught to large groups, small groups, or one-on-one.
Many community programs also involve parents or older siblings in the process of learning to read. Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself is used for teaching the English language and reading to youth and adults in community colleges, correctional settings, and in the workplace. There is a great advantage in teaching both the parent and the child. Here’s the big bonus: Adults and students in middle school through high school can usually complete the course within three to five months, with an average reading-level gain of three years.
Because Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself also has a computer component, parents (and older siblings) can work independently, learning the skills their children (or siblings) will be learning. Strengthening families will strengthen our communities and our nation.