Late Stage 1 - Reading, Spelling and Writing Tasks: Target 4

Designed by a Speech Pathologist for use in schools and the home, this program for 6 to 7 year olds focuses on early literacy, reading and spelling abilities with such phonic concepts: ay, ar, or, ai, oy, oi, er. The explicit teaching format incorporates multiple word reading and spelling tasks.

In order for phonic based reading and spelling materials to be effective children must possess adequate phonemic awareness skills. This resource incorporates a significant phonemic awareness element. While this is ideal for the dyslexic and learning difficulties population (who are typically insensitive to the phonemic structure of words and rely on the visual appearance of words) this approach has proven to effectively accelerate early reading and spelling skills with the more mainstream population.

Attention to mouth movements involved in producing the sounds in words heightens children’s attention to the phonemic structure and supports the organisation of the letter symbols in spelling and the decoding of the symbols in reading. The combination of the attention to the oral, auditory and visual aspects achieves balanced word attack strategies and significantly accelerates the acquisition of the earliest reading and spelling steps.

The aim of this resource is to establish the ability to read and spell regular phonic words. For some students, once this skill is established they then require multiple opportunities to practice this skill (e.g. reading 200 to 300 such words) before these basic words are read automatically (i.e. without sounding out). For students who require more practice and rehearsal, the games based program Stage 1 Single Word Decoding and Spelling Skills is recommended.

Features:

• A full term’s worth of early literacy tasks
• Single word “sounding out” and spelling tasks
• Sentence level reading and writing tasks