Teacher D Simpson (West Jessamine Middle, Nicholasville, Ky.) teaches in a resource room for students with very low reading abilities who need explicit reading instruction at an early literacy acquisition level.

Her eighth-grade students receive explicit instruction in decoding and encoding. A typical lesson includes talking, manipulating, and writing. D uses the Wilson Reading System*, a research-based reading and writing program for teaching decoding and encoding with phoneme segmentation. WRS presents the language system of English in a systematic and cumulative manner. The system is organized, sequential, and multisensory. (*The Kentucky Department of Education does not discriminate against nor promote a specific product.)

D reviews the class routine and leads the students in a choral review of sounds focusing on letters of the alphabet including short vowel sounds and digraphs as they look at a key word for each sound.

A cookie tray activity has students using magnetic letters for this multi-sensory activity, the students tap out phonemes as they sound them and move the letter magnets.

In a blending game, The students must blend the sounds D gives and find the word on one of the game cards.

This video was originally part of a multimedia professional development resource, Literacy Without Limits, produced by KET in 2007 in collaboration with the Kentucky Department of Education.

Literacy Without Limits

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