Apparently my school system has just adopted “Early Success” to use for reading intervention in grades K-3. Is anyone familiar with it? I did a search, and the parent company does “Soar to Success.” I’m just curious - my son is in 4th grade, and won’t have access to the program.
Soar to Success
The SOAR manual openly states that it is for kids needing comprhension intervention and not those with decoding issues. For example, at the 6th grade level, one wouldn’t use SOAR if the student were reading below about Grade 3 (even if slowly). Lots of teachers/districts try to make it fit for all students and it just isn’t designed for that.
I used it in a district I worked in a few years ago. It’s roughly modeled on Reading Recovery—lots of rereading familiar texts, running records, leveled texts (which correspond thematically with Houghton-Mifflin basals), a “Making Words” activity (based on Cunningham’s activity), and some spelling using Elkonin boxes. My only problems with it is that the text wasn’t decodable, so kids just learning phonics couldn’t really practice their decoding skills in context. There really wasn’t much in the way of direct phonics instruction. (I added a modified Orton-Gillingham component most of the time; maybe they’ve added decodable texts now.) The Making Words activity was good for practicing letter deletion/substitution and rhyming.
Soar to Success had authentic literature, Making Big Words activities, and lots of comprehension/writing instruction. Still not much in the way of explicit decoding instruction. It did offer signs with strategic ways to identify words, though, which was useful.