What We Offer
AN OVERVIEW OF SPELLREAD™
SpellRead™ is a unique and highly effective reading intervention program that increases students’ reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling. Through systematic and easy-to-follow instruction, students build an understanding and mastery of specific skills that struggling readers have in common.
The SpellRead™ program provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonetic decoding, spelling, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. So that students’ comprehension is not sacrificed by reading that is labored and inefficient, phonological automaticity is one of the program’s fundamental goals and integrated into all activities.
SpellRead™ changes how students interpret and store reading information in different areas of the brain by integrating both the auditory and visual aspects of the reading process. SpellRead’s™ intensive intervention trains the brain to build connections between the phonological and oral language systems so that students are able to read and write at the level at which they already speak and listen.
Designed for students aged 5 to adult, SpellRead™ is able to help a wide range of readers, writers and spellers who struggle with the sound-symbol system or encounter difficulty with fluency and comprehension.
The SpellRead™ program reliably improves reading skills across diverse populations, and it is widely accepted and referred to by psychologists, speech therapists, and teachers.
Program History
The concept for the SpellRead™ program was developed by Dr. Kay MacPhee, a Canadian educator. Dr. MacPhee spent 25 years learning and developing techniques to enable the hearing-impaired to acquire language skills for reading. Even though her research began with hearing-impaired children, Dr. MacPhee demonstrated that the same techniques are highly effective for all students who struggle to read.
Program Sequence
The SpellRead™ program is divided into three Phases: A, B, and C.
In Phase A, students are taught to identify and manipulate the 44 sounds of the English language. This is called phonemic awareness and it is the skill that forms the foundation for all seven reading skills on the Reading Pyramid. SpellRead™ introduces sounds slowly and systematically, beginning with sounds that are easiest to hear, pronounce, identify, and manipulate. Working intensely with individual sounds at the single syllable level helps students build confidence and a strong foundation.
Phase B focuses on consonant blends, secondary vowel spellings, and decoding two- and three-syllable words.
Phase C introduces clusters, which are predictable, non-phonetic word endings like “-tion” in the word “action.” Phase C also teaches common verb patterns and practices decoding longer multisyllabic words.
Approximately 86% of English words are predictable, so being able to access the predictable patterns enables students to read more effortlessly. Phases A, B, and C all focus on automaticity with sounds and patterns. Automaticity is the ability to quickly and accurately identify words without hesitation or deliberation. To break through common compensatory strategies like memorization, SpellRead™ uses nonsense words, which force students to decode and strengthen sound-symbol relationships in the brain.
The curriculum repeats and reworks skills in a progression of instruction that builds on itself. This design is to ensure that the progress students make will continue long after they complete the SpellRead™ program.
Class Structure
Every class session is divided into three segments: linguistic foundations, active reading, and writing connections. Classes include phonics instruction (which is described above in the three phases) as well as guided oral reading, during which students practice, apply, and transfer their skills using texts at their reading level. Then students write about what they read, which helps to demonstrate comprehension, spelling, and composition skills.
Integrating all these skills makes each new concept more readily absorbable. This builds fluency and helps students move forward to increase vocabulary, background knowledge of specific topics, and comprehension skills.
Classes integrate multi-sensory activities and games, making learning fun while building confidence and strengthening skills.
Scientifically Tested and Proven
The SpellRead™ curriculum has been rigorously tested as part of numerous clinical studies, the results of which are published in journals and reading research foundations such as the What Works Clearinghouse, part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences. These results show SpellRead™ to be the number one program in developing reading comprehension, which is the ultimate goal of proficient reading.
Now that you understand a bit more about our program, please contact us to talk specifically about how we can help your child.
