What Do You DO Between PG (code instruction) and REWARDS?

Look at Shay’s old posts for her general outline of what she does. She also posted a long guest post in the last couple of days, if you look for it.

For myself, I continue with the same phonics series I use all along, which moves into syllabification and word parts and variant spellings after the code is taught. I use in parallel to this old basals with very good deveopmental comprehension workbooks — or else just the workbooks and reading good youth novels.

This transition is really hard for most people, I think.

I suspect you will find what you need by asking Victoria for downloads of some of her earlier posts. She has some sound prescriptions, and I will not to presume to speak for her.

One of her concepts is what she terms: MASSED PRACTICE. Another suggestion is judicious use of some of the old basals. Victoria finds these at thrift stores and at Amason.com.

Apparently the publishers of Rewards are coming out with an intermediate version in June of this year (grades 4-6, whereas Rewards was designed for middle school). This might help fill in that gap.

Publisher Blurb: Used to decode long words and increase oral silent reading fluency, this version will teach more explicitly the preskills (vowels & affixes) with more lessons, is written at a lower readability and with topics of interest to intermediate grade students in mind, added attention is given to word families, and has a stronger more explicit vocabulary component.

Nancy

Janis asked:

I have kids who finish basic and advanced code intstruction and we work and work on building automaticity and fluency (with decodable text and some Seeing Stars). But I am seeing it can take awhile to make that leap from second to fourth grade reading level when you can start REWARDS.

I’ve had excellent results (repeatedly, in different schools, with many different students with various challenges) using the text from Reading Mastery III and IV at this point. For one or two students, you don’t need the teacher presentation books, just the student books (hardback text and workbook). You don’t need to work all the way through RM III (Grade 2 level) or IV (Grade 3 level) either — you can accelerate and do some judicious curriculum compaction.

Some reasons why these books work well:

- the stories are fully decodable and provide opportunities to practice skills learned; new vocabulary is introduced at the beginning of each story and you can do sorts, word analysis etc. as needed before reading
- the stories gradually increase in difficulty, not only in terms of code but also in syntactical complexity, sentence length, and use of multisyllabic words. The increase is gradual and students are successful with it. There are rate and accuracy criteria for reading each story, so you know when students need to reread or need additional work before proceeding.
- the stories incorporate both fiction and non-fiction, with a lot of science/social studies content. This helps students learn to read different types of text and organize and classify information.
- the stories are in mini-series — 4-10 stories on same topic, for instance, so you can use them as the basis for a mini-unit (for example, on inventions, characteristics of living things, or the human body); these can provide that “massed practice” and also builds vocabulary and basic conceptual frameworks. When accelerating, you can elect to “skip” a series of stories and move on to the next, as long as the student meets the criteria for the next stories.
- the workbook is well-done, with both higher-level thinking exercises and rote recall, vocabulary and sequencing type questions. You can have the student do most of the workbook exercises for homework. There is lots of repetition, which ensures long-term retention of important concepts and vocabulary.
- fluency work is built-in, but the criteria are low. I would raise it, myself, using benchmarks from DIBELS for the grade the student is in. Students enjoy keeping an ongoing graph of their rate. The textbook has little asterisks in the text marking 100-word intervals, making it easy to do rate checkouts.
- If students have good code knowledge at a Grade 2 level, I find most can get to a Grade 4 level (as measured by standardized tests as well as informal checkouts) within half a school year, even if they are “LD.” Kids with lower cognitive abilities will progress more slowly but will still make dramatic gains.
— the materials lend themselves to co-ordination with classroom work and independent research projects, if applicable. There are some suggestions for these in the texts themselves.
— Most of the materials can be had on Ebay fairly cheaply. If you buy from the company (SRA) you have to buy student sets of 5, which may be more than you want.
— although the workbooks are designed to be consumable, I find it works fine to have the students write the answers in a notebook instead. For those for whom this would be too challenging, using plastic page protectors over the workbook, and writing with dry-erase markers, works well. That way the books are re-usable.

Susan S.
Ontario, Canada

Reading Mastery sounds like the kind of program that is needed, thanks. When I get a little money I’ll go to Amazon and take a look for it.
Personally I am very iffy about any stress on speed, but it sounds like the skills and content are all there which is the most important thing.

Y’all are the BEST!!! Thank you!

I am excited to know that a lower level REWARDS is coming out! And the Reading Mastery sounds perfect in the meanwhile for the kids who are a little old for RALP books.

Janis