My school district has purchased materials and trained teachers in this program, the stated goals of which are to “provide teachers with the tools to link assessment, teaching and learning to maximize each child’s growth in language and literacy”. It offers “direct links to developmentally appropriate teaching strategies and learning activities”. (This advertising blurb is about as much as I was able to get out of the not-too informative First Steps website.)
I just put in a training request for Phono-Graphix; my principal is willing to fund me but asked me for a rationale to support my going off on a non-district-supported tangent. My reply was that my general impression was that First Steps targets the whole-school population and may be useful in a general sense (like Reading Recovery, only targetted to a wider age range and covering more language strands) but won’t necessarily give me a direct instruction-based method of teaching reading to the two classes of 8-10 teenaged failed readers I will be teaching next year. I plan to do the First Steps training too, but wonder if anyone can confirm my general impression of this program?
Thank you.