IN-HOME LITERACY FOUNDATIONS

SPECIALEDUCATIONTEACHER.CA  follows a structured Literacy framework that uses explicit, systematic methods for building the foundational skills needed for independent reading and writing. 

 We have our students practice hearing, isolating, and manipulating individual units of sound orally, completely without print support.

Before a child can learn to read "with their eyes," they must first learn to read "with their ears."

RHYMING & ALLITERATION: 

Noticing and tracking the natural patterns in how words sound.

SYLLABLES: 

Breaking spoken words down into their rhythmic beats.

ORAL MANIPULATION: 

Blending and segmenting speech sounds out loud to build strong phonemic tracking.

PHONEMIC SEGMENTATION: 

Using physical markers, sound boxes, and concrete gestures to touch each individual sound heard in a word.

EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION: 

Moving students systematically past simple rhyming directly into the critical skills of phoneme isolation and word segmenting to tackle blending challenges.

We seamlessly transition student learning from oral sound awareness to print. We explicitly teach the relationships between letters and sounds, allowing students to decode (read) and encode (spell) words accurately without guessing.

SPECIALEDUCATIONTEACHER.CA

 follows a SYSTEMATIC phonics progression  an explicit, evidence-based scope and sequence.

CVC WORDS 

(Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) 

BLENDS-DIGRAPHS- VOWEL TEAMS

UFLI FOUNDATIONS: 

We utilize the UFLI curriculum framework for high-impact, systematic phonics lessons that build rapid word-level accuracy.

HEART WORDS: 

We apply specialized mapping techniques to help students remember the irregular parts of high-frequency words for automatic recognition.

ACADIENCE READING: 

We utilize Acadience Reading as a precise diagnostic and progress-monitoring tool. It strips away the guesswork by measuring a student's exact foundational reading gaps and tracking their growth with accuracy to ensure our interventions are working.

DECODABLE BOOKS: 

We use controlled, decodable texts rather than predictable or repetitive books, ensuring our students actively practice the specific phonics patterns they have been taught.

Writing is a task made up of many connected parts. We support students who struggle with the writing process by identifying precise barriers to learning and strengthening them through explicit structure.

VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT: Building a robust 'mental dictionary' so students understand the words they are reading and writing.

MORPHOLOGY: 

Studying prefixes, suffixes, and base words to simultaneously unlock advanced reading comprehension, spelling accuracy, and vocabulary depth.

SYNTAX & STRUCTURE: 

Explicitly teaching the rules of sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation so students can organize their thoughts clearly and make their writing more readable.

WRITING SCAFFOLDING: 

Breaking complex writing assignments into manageable steps using sentence frames, graphic organizers, and explicit modeling.

We help students improve their reading comprehension skills so they can tackle texts with more independence.

COMPREHENSION & INFERENCE: 

We move our students beyond the literal facts in texts so they can independently and more accurately synthesize information, analyze themes, and understand implied meaning.

TRANSFERABLE SKILLS: 

Building a stronger language comprehension foundation that transfers directly to academic text analysis across science, social studies, and mathematical word problems.