This grant is for the purchase of decodable book sets aimed at middle school readers, which would supplement the phonics instruction program currently being used in our Special Education reading intervention classes.
As a middle school special education teacher, I teach students with a wide range of reading abilities, starting with beginning readers. Teaching phonics to middle schoolers is no easy feat, and we often have to get creative to keep it exciting. However, in my experience, students are eager to become stronger readers. They are motivated to do the work, and are proud and excited when things start to "click" for them.
The Sonday program used in our district is a research-based phonics intervention program for students with reading difficulties. This is a great program, and we have seen a lot of success using it with our students. However, one thing that is missing from this program is the opportunity for students to practice the learned skills with longer reading passages. The program only provides short sentences with which to practice the phonics skills being taught. In the four years that I have been using Sonday, I have noticed that this seems to impact the transfer of skills to other literature. I believe that by giving students more opportunities to practice their phonics skills using decodable texts, students will progress more quickly.