[senco-forum] KS3 Literacy catch up programmes

I use Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc2, which has proved to be succesful. But I think that any synthetic phonics based programme would be effective, providing that the person delivering it has an understanding of the principles; which are not at all difficult to grasp. 

I also like the Sound Discovery 'Snappy Lesson' which works from teaching specific phoneme/grapehemes correspondences, using them for reading words by decoding and blending, then moves to reading sentences. It then uses the same words & sentences for segmenting and dictation. Thus incorporating reading and spelling within the same lesson.

I know that many people swear by Toe by Toe, but it doesn't seem to give children opportunities for practising reading and writing real words and sentences within the session and so can seem a bit meaningless for the child.  I have a few Y7s who have supposedly 'done' it at primary, to little apparent effect.  But that might be because the primary has 'adapted' it to teach the HFWs as sight words, which completely goes against the principles of synthetic phonics and, I think, muddles the children badly as they are unclear as to what strategy (decoding or sight recognition) they are supposed to use when they encounter new words.

Phonographix type programmes are also effective.

Materials can, of course, be copied and enlarged if that would help the VI child.

Maggie

Alice Chenneour Randall <alice.chenneour at btinternet.com> wrote: I deleted the last mail on literacy catch-up programmes and regretted this when I was asked by the SENCo of the school where I support a VI learner, if there was a programme suitable for him (he's got quite a severe VI and is working below Level 3); the difficulty is that there is so much material out there and very little which can be delivered by a relatively inexperienced soul; the ICT programmes are a complete non-starter for him. Any thoughts/ideas would be most welcome but my own thoughts would be for a combination of 'Toe by Toe' and something else!!!!!
  Alice

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