Really Great Reading's Phonics Boost
Phonics Boost is a set of 80 intervention lessons for students in grades 3–12 who have significant and severe decoding weaknesses. The primary focus of the lessons is phonemic awareness, phonics concepts, and essential word-attack skills and the net effect of these lessons is faster and more accurate reading of complex text.
Students’ accuracy, fluency, and comprehension improve when they learn with Phonics Boost. Students placed in Phonics Boost have typically struggled to acquire key foundational literacy skills, and need a slower pace and more practice than their peers. We also offer HD Word for grades 3–12.
- Intervention
- RTI
- Tier 2 & 3
- 40-60 Minutes a Day
- Grades 3–12 - RTI, Tier 2 and 3, dyslexia, and special education intervention for students who struggle with basic phonics skills
- small groups up to 10 people
Phonics Boost can be supplemented with Phonics Boost Plus and progressed monitored using Phonics Boost Skills Assessments.
Boost Teacher's Lesson Plans
The Phonics Boost Teacher's Guides provide teachers with all the lessons they need to effectively teach Phonics Boost. All the lessons are built for the teacher and include a thorough explanation of the concepts, routines, and procedures. The lessons are easy to follow so they can be taught by a wide range of educators, not just seasoned literacy professionals, and phonics specialists. For those unfamiliar with teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, the guides include incremental professional development for each lesson.
Boost Online
Boost Online Teacher Presentation Tool is an interactive teaching tool can be used with Boost to add a new dimension to instruction. Boost Online will help you engage emerging and struggling readers as you work through the Boost lessons. These virtual manipulatives help make important concepts obvious to your students and reduce teacher prep and set-up time. Students learn concepts faster and retain them better when the teacher uses these online tools.
Boost Student Workbooks
This set of 6 books contains everything a student needs to participate in the lessons; 4 student workbooks contain the phonics practice activities that help students develop mastery and automaticity, and 2 passage books contain the oral reading passages that help students build better fluency. The practice activities follow a standard Orton Gillingham scope and sequence. The activities are engaging, mature, and move at a pace that is appropriate for students in grades 3-12. There is a high concentration of academic vocabulary and students learn how to read the complex multi-syllable words that they encounter across the curriculum.
Phonics Student Kit
The Student Phonics Kit is an essential part of Phonics Suite instruction. Students use the magnetic letter tiles and SyllaBoards to practice the phonics concepts taught in the lessons. They use the calculator and colored pencils as they track errors and chart their fluency rate and accuracy during oral reading.
The Student Phonics Kit can also be used by tutors working with one or two students or with other phonics-based programs.
Phonics Boost and Blitz Skills Assessment
Phonics Skills Assessments (PSSA) are used to measure the progress of students receiving Phonics Boost of Phonics Blitz instruction. They provide a highly structured way to assess the specific skills student should have mastered after completing certain lessons. The PSSAs, combined with the teachers’ ongoing classroom observations of students’ growth, are a powerful tool for evaluating success and planning future instruction.
The PSSAs consist of 40 separate pre- and post-assessments that systematically measure mastery of the phonemic awareness and phonics concepts taught in Phonics Suite. The assessments allow educators to chart progress, report on student growth, and are a wonderful way to provide meaningful data to students, parents, teachers, and administrators.
Phonics Boost Plus
Phonics Boost Plus is a supplement used to augment Phonics Boost and Blitz. Phonics Boost Plus has 40 modules. Each module is aligned with one or more specific lessons from Phonics Boost and Blitz and provides hundreds of multisensory activities and materials for strategic supplementation. It is designed for students that are growing with the lessons but need more practice and repetition to master and build automaticity with the concepts.
Boost Student Group Size, Scope and Sequence and Lesson Structure
Phonics Boost lessons are most effective with small-group instruction. The group sizes vary from 3-12 students and are dependent on the deficit level of the students and their grades. Our complimentary Grouping Matrix™ will help identify the level of decoding difficulty for each student, the recommended set of lessons from Phonics Suite™, and the maximum group size. Sign up for free access to the Grouping Matrix.
The Phonics Boost scope and sequence is systematic and cumulative. Not all students start with Lesson 1 and complete all 80 lessons. There are multiple entry points for the lessons and many students test out of the program after just 25-30 hours of instruction.
Each Phonics Boost lesson has four parts: Oral Reading, with students periodically charting their own accuracy and fluency rate; Phonemic Awareness skill-building activities; Phonics Concepts, taught with engaging manipulatives; and Student Practice with students reading words and sentences out loud, with the teacher providing immediate supportive feedback.
Complimentary Initial Diagnostics
The most effective first step toward implementing our Phonics Suite lessons is assessing your students with our Diagnostic Decoding Surveys. In just 5-7 minutes, these assessments help educators identify which students have decoding deficits impairing their ability to comprehend. Since they can pinpoint an individual’s word-level strengths and weaknesses, the data can be leveraged to determine what types of instruction will have the maximum impact on student success. Our complimentary packets contain everything you’ll need for the initial assessment of an unlimited number of students. The packet also provides an explanation of how the survey results can be used to group students, and it offers guidance on how to plan effective and efficient instruction.
Complimentary Student Grouping
Successful reading interventions start with accurate diagnosis and grouping. RGR’s Grouping Matrix helps facilitate differentiated data-driven instruction and reporting. It is a free, web-based data management system that enables educators to group students (from the middle of 1st through 12th grade) according to the type and depth of their decoding difficulties. The same data management system can be used to monitor progress, report and adjust.
Professional Development
Teacher background knowledge is a key component of successful reading intervention. Really Great Reading offers different training options to provide teachers and interventionists with the background knowledge they’ll need to successfully diagnose, group, and teach struggling decoders. Even if you don’t use Phonics Blitz or Phonics Boost, our professional development will offer you valuable techniques for helping struggling readers.
Check out our workshops and webinars, and access our training modules.
