Cycle 15

This task returns to blending two final consonants that are both stop phonemes (in the words act and fact), but—this time—the instructor does not say the word first, and the student and instructor do not segment them simultaneously before the student attempts it solo.  If the student struggles, say it simultaneously with them as a way to support them.

Continue to count the sounds on your fingers when you say each word the slow way.  The number of sounds in each word is located in parentheses next to the phonetic spelling of that word.

This task returns to rhyming words that begin with a stop sound, but, this time, you won’t model each rhyme for the student first.

Unlike the previous Rhyming task, which started with a continuous phoneme, you cannot hold this initial sound because it's a stop phoneme. Reading words that begin with a stop phoneme is a difficult skill for emerging readers to master. It a student struggles, and you need to model for them, it is very important to make sure you do not pause between the stop phoneme and the rest of the word.

From now on, the yellow and green audio buttons will appear to the right of each numbered word in the instructor pane.

Starting with this cycle, Word Reading tasks will no longer include purple correction text in the instructor pane.  Continue to correct students’ mistakes in the same way that the curriculum has called for thus far.  The bullets below provide a reminder of how to do so.

General Notes on this Type of Task:

Sounding Out Slowly

• If the student says an incorrect sound, say: “This sound is /___/.  What sound is it?...  Read the word again.”
• If the student pauses between any of the sounds, use the steps in the flowchart to correct them.
• If the student’s finger stops beneath a small letter, or if the student reads a small letter, say: “Just read the big sounds, and skip any small ones, like this: /_____/.  Let’s touch and read it together: /_____/.  Good.  Your turn by yourself…”

Blending

• If the student says the correct sounds for each letter but still fails to blend it into the correct word, that’s probably because they paused between sounds.  Go back to the first bullet point in this list.
• If the student sounds out a word slowly well and still blends it incorrectly, say: “My turn to read it fast: __.  Your turn to read it fast…”

Remember that in this task, the goal is not fruit identification. The goal is for students to keep their finger tracking along beneath the pieces of fruit that they are naming.

This is the first task with small red dots beneath a line of story text.  These small red dots indicate moments when the instructor should pause students’ reading in order to ask a question, give an instruction, or give information.  The white number within each red dot corresponds to a number in the instructors’ script on the right.  When a student reaches a red dot as they read, the instructor should read the prompt that begins with that number in the script.

If a student asks about the red dots, just say that the red dots show you when to ask them a question.