Intervention A sandbox

From FreeReading

Welcome to FreeReading's Intervention A, a reading intervention program for Kindergarten and 1st Grade students who need additional help with phonemic awareness and phonics.

The program consists of multiple overlapping strands of instruction:

Instructional Strands

Strand	Description
Letter Sounds	Students learn to say the most common sound for printed letters.
Letter Writing	Students learn the correct way to write letters.
Phonological Awareness	Students learn to blend and segment the sounds in spoken words.
Sounding Out	Students put everything they have learned so far together, so that they can take a regular word in print, such as sat, produce the letter-sound pattern, sssaaat, and blend to produce the word, sat. For the first time, they read words.
Word-Form Recognition	Students take a regular word in print and say it without sounding out aloud
Irregular Words	Students learn to read high-frequency irregular words such as the and was by sight.
Reading Connected Text	Students learn to read their first sentence-long stories.
Letter Combinations	Students learn to say the most common sounds for letter combinations such as sh and oa.
Irregular Words II	Students expand the set of high-frequency irregular words that they can read by sight.
Advanced Phonics	Students learn to read words with features such as inflected endings, silent letters, and multiple syllables.

The Program

The program comprises 24 weeks of instruction. Click on a week to view and print the activities for that week. You can also download and print an Excel version of the complete map here.

Intervention A

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10
Week 11	Week 12	Week 13	Week 14	Week 15
Week 16	Week 17	Week 18	Week 19	Week 20
Week 21	Wek 22	Week 23	Week 24

Some Notes About the Program

What's Not Included

• Intervention A does not include built-in assessment. Educators should supplement it with an early-reading assessment such as DIBELS or TPRI.
• The program does not explicitly address the following, which should be the subject of the core reading program or other supplemental material:
  • Comprehension strategies
  • Vocabulary
  • Oral language
  • Conceptual understanding
  • Content knowledge
  • Spelling and writing (other than letter writing)
  • Vocabulary-learning strategies
  • Affect and motivation to read.

Pedagogy

The program is research-based. You can see references here.

A key feature of the pedagogy is the use of an Introduce, Reintroduce, Build Accuracy, Build Fluency progression for each strand of instruction. By accuracy we mean helping students discriminate between similar items such as letters m and n or irregular words this and that. By fluency we mean helping students become automatic in foundation skills such as blending. Further discussion of the pedagogical approach can be found here.