Does anyone use "Soar to Success" by Houghton Miff

Soar to Success was designed for students with slight or limited decoding needs—it is a comprehension strategies program. I use it to build comprehension skills—sometimes in conjuction w/a phonics program and sometimes in isolation. Fluency can also be added. I do not use Read Naturally, but understand that it is or has a fluency component.

I like both Soar and know many who like Read Naturally.

I have no knowledge of the Reward Program. Doesn’t sound much like reading…

Hope this helps. What are your child’s reading roblems?

Hi Susan,
My son is dyslexic with a single core deficit (severely low RAN).
He needs lots of exposure and re-exposure to orthographic patterns otherwise he tends to “forget” how to read.

From what you’re describing, it sounds like the school’s program may not be adequate for remediating this type of reading problem.

The instructor is modifying the program to include more multi-sensory phonics…

It’s a question you might ask because the phonics component in Soar to Success isn’t designed for remediating severe phonics issues.

The Rewards program is designed to teach decoding of multi-syllable words and to increase fluency and rate. I have just begun using it with my 8th graders. The program is intense instruction in long words. It teaches a specific set of strategies for dealing with decoding. Once you get about half way through the program the students begin sentence and passage reading. The focus becomes one of using the strategy effectively for comprehension. I am impressed so far with the program.

Thanks for explaining this to me. I’m going to see the program next week and I’ll find out how it’s being used.

Dear Susan,
Thanks for explaining this to me.

For my son, he seems to need lots of repetition of orthographic patterns (easily matching sound to symbol). He has very strong auditory skills, but a problem with automaticity.

I do a lot with him at home so he has made fairly good progress. We did PG and I’m currently pushing his home reading level quite high (“A Mouse Called Wolf” by Dick King-Smith). During our reading at home I make lists of multisyllable words he’s having difficulty with, we’ll practice them over a few days, adding more, taking others off the list…work on speed of recognition, etc…. Also, for fluency I have him read a short simple book over a period of three days, using a stopwatch we aim for speed.

I think I have multisyllable and fluency exercises covered at home. I haven’t worked extensively on comprehension (except for Language Wise exercises and asking him questions about the material we’re reading), so maybe their program at school might be beneficial for comprehension.

I’ll be curious to see how they run the program.
Again, thanks for your help!

Dear Nan,
The Rewards program sounds very good! I’ll have to take a look at that since I think my son could probably use extra practice with multi-syllable decoding.

Thanks for sharing this information! :-)

This week I had an 8th grade student who reads at a second grade level read a list of 25 multi-syllable words such as (reconsider, anticipation, absurb, reabsorb, contradict) with 100% accuracy. This was only lesson three of the Rewards program. We are not reading sentences or passages that include these words yet but I think the program is great. My kids have done three lessons and their ability to decode these words is improving every day.

Wow! Maybe I should purchase some of the materials for home.

Do you think the program might be helpful for an 8-year-old who has difficulty with “automaticity” or difficulty automatically remembering orthographic patterns? Although he can read quite well because we’ve been working intensively for quite some time now, but he reads very slowly because he has to think about and decode almost every single word — even words he has read previously (except the simplest 2-3 letter words. He explained to me that he does know these words automatically now…so we are making slooooow progress, but progress nevertheless!!!).

It’s not exactly a fluency problem, but an “automaticity” problem.