I just purchased this book from amazon.com and I want to do this with some of my 6th graders this year. I have read through the first three chapters and I may have missed this but, should I do the entire program with my students? I have 14 6th graders in my class and not all of them, in fact most of them do not need all of this. Plus, I only have 50 minutes and I need to do other things during this time too. I think I have 3-4 students who need most if not all of this program. How do I test them and determine what part to begin with or do you reccomment that I just push on through the entire program. I only have 30 days of school left.
Nan
Re: reading reflex
Given your time limit, I would suggest that you test the 3-4 who really need it individually. (The assessments in the front of the book are meant to be done one-on-one.) Maybe you could have each of them miss a recess for this purpose. Then I would keep the same group in before or after school (or at recess, depending on your schedule) after explaining to them and their parents the importance of doing this program. The assessment tests will tell you what chapter to start with, and, given the age of your students, this is not likely to be chapter 3. You will be able to move quite quickly through Chapter 4. Most likely your students will need to spend the most time on the multisyllable management chapter (Chapter 5).
With my grade 9 group of moderately to severely LD students, I introduced 2-3 sound pictures per day, integrated the lessons with their spelling and did oral reading daily, during which time we focussed on pre-segmenting and blending potentially troublesome words, reading orally (with error correction as outlined in the pgm.). The latter activity is the heart of the program. Make sure you have them read regularly out loud and that they apply whatever sound pic you’ve gone over with them. (Example, circle/point out all the words with the oa or tion sound pictures or whatever.) After about 16-19 hours I saw significant gains. Good luck, and don’t feel daunted. Progress can be rapid with this pgm.
I do many of the activities with my whole class, such as mapping of words, we call it Making Words. I do many different activities with prefixes, suffixes and root words as part of my language class. I need help in figuring out how best to use this program in the short time I have left of this year.