Phonics multisensory reading curriculum supports special needs students and teachers

Easy-for-Me™ Multisensory Reading Phonics Curriculum Contains the Five Essential Components of Reading

1. Phonemic Awareness
Because words are made of sounds, that is how we teach reading. Children learn their sounds, then have a chance for extensive auditory practice in every lesson. Every lesson is written so that the teacher has the activities for each day already planned out. One reason this program is so successful with children who struggled is because we rely so heavily on hearing sounds in words rather than on remember sequences of symbols (letters) as we learn to read. For right brained learners and children with learning disabilities, this is critical.
2. Phonics
Careful, in-depth phonics instruction forms the backbone of the Easy-for-Me™ Reading Curriculum. Instead of teaching letter sequences, the program focuses on sound spellings so that every letter in a word is accounted for. Patterns are emphasized, as well as the context of the word within its word family. For instance, when the children learn the sight word "play," they also learn that AY says [sound of long] A, and that that particular spelling pattern is found in all these words: day, say, may, lay, jay, stay, spray, tray, etc. The sound spelling is colored so that it stands out visually as a unit, showing that the sound is used in many other words.
3. Vocabulary
Learning vocabulary is key. Starting in Lesson 1, children learn not only their first sound, but also their first sight word. In introducing each sound, eight illustrated words that begin with that sound are provided. The teacher can use these in teaching vocabulary, but also for ongoing initial sound discrimination activities. Any new vocabulary is explained and is sometimes illustrated for the teacher. For instance, when using the word family OG, information about bogs and hogs are provided so the teacher can share these tidbits of information with her class without having to do research on her own.
4. Fluency
From the very beginning of the curriculum, fluency is a critical goal. Children not only are taught to scan text looking for patterns they have learned, but they also are learning many words on sight, learning to use pictures to cue their reading, and echo-reading with their teaching in learning phrasing and expression. Every single skill the children learn is immediately placed within sentences that are meaningful to them and that they can read!
5. Comprehension
Among the many resources provided for the teacher, comprehension activities abound. Included are activities for word/picture match, initial sound/picture match, sentence/picture match, story sequencing activities, etc.

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Easy-for-Me™ is Research Based

We've done our research to discover how children learn best. We know they are tactile learners from the time they first notice their world. They learn via stories. They love patterns. They love to move! The disconnect is not in the area of our understanding how children learn naturally, the great crying need has been for an approach to teaching reading (and everything else!) that will take the information we know about how children learn naturally, and apply that knowledge to programs we design and use with our children. The beginning pages of the Teaching Manual lays out some of the research I read as I was in graduate school, studying everything I could find about how children learn. I was captivated by the notion that every child CAN learn. I came to believe the problem was not with the brains of our children who fail, but the system we use is what is lacking. Reading the experts on learning motivated me to search out ways to meet the needs of my students. Research provided a framework for me as I would leave class and return to my little short people... many of them not able to remember from one hour to the next a word we'd "learned." The passion became to discover how to apply our knowledge about children's brains to designing materials that turn on the "aha-lights" for all our children. There is nothing like it when you are witness to that moment with a child who had previous struggled to read.

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Easy-for-Me™ is based on years of research with real children

     I was blessed to have my own students to work with while I read the experts on how children learn. It was my task to figure out how to help them learn. If something did not work with all the kids, I would try something else. Only what made that "aha-light" come on stayed in the repertoire. The emergence of the notion of stylizing sight words came as a result of having a group of kids who could literally decode anything at age five (including words with ough in them!) and yet they could not do anything BUT decode! They decoded everything tediously, and none of us were enjoying the process! They had acquired the skill of decoding; not reading.
One day in my utter desperation, while trying to teach the word "help," I asked the kids, "What does this word LOOK like to you?" One child answered, "It looks like someone in the water raising their arms and yelling HELP!" Quite true. Help does look like that when you write the word all in lowercase: help. The h and the l are the arms.
     For the next months, I worked through a word at a time with these kindergarteners, asking "What does this word look like" and then stylizing them on my computer. Next day I'd show them the word and get their OK or their suggestions on how to improve the word so they could really remember it. This process started in December. By April, those same children were able to fluently recognize sight words through 3rd grade. Of course, this success led to other experiments that utilized similar principles of teaching and learning. Now, teaching to the child's brain has become second nature: all because of what those children taught me about what helps them the most.
     Some adults fear the new visual, fun thing we are doing, saying that these visuals and patterns are crutches that children will not be able to do without, or maybe it is like cheating! But what these materials do is take the work out of learning, provide visual and kinesthetic hooks for recall, and allow a lot of children experience success who would not have otherwise. Whenever I have been greatly surprised that a student knew a word in his reading, I would ask, "HOW did you know that word?" Invariably the answer was that that word had the picture of ..... with it.
     In the page below, fingermapping is introduced. Fingermapping is a simple tool I discovered works wonders with children who simply cannot seem to know the order letters go in a word. Little ones who omit the middle vowel, or middle schoolers who leave letters out, substitute letters, or reverse sounds.... all this melts away when you fingermap.

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Easy-for-Me™ Closes the Gaps for Learners

Teachers also say "this is easy for me!" because we include many helps for teaching concepts that children may find difficult to remember. This is a sample "poster" that you may use in teaching and then post in the classroom. There are posters for remembering how to spell OU and OW, for distinguishing between ME and MY and much more.

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Easy-for-Me™ Is a Careful Blend of Sight Words and Phonics Instruction

The debate is over! Kids need instruction in both sight words recognition and extensive phonics skills. We start on day one teaching both, so that by Lesson 20, the child can read his first book! This practice will PREVENT problems for kids who cannot just decode, kids who can ONLY decode, kids who struggle with collections of symbols. The marriage of phonics and sight word learning via visuals and motions is like a magic trick for learning. The process of learning to read truly is easier and for sure it is more fun for teacher and child!

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Easy-for-Me™ Uses Structural Analysis of Sight Words to Drive Phonics Instruction

Advanced sound spellings are introduced and taught when that spelling pattern appears in a sight word. For instance, long A spelling pattern AY is taught, and a list of words is generated when the lesson includes the sight word PLAY. In Lesson 66 (below), a sight word taught is ARE, so the concept of Bossy R (R controlled vowels) is introduced. Every time a new sound spelling is taught, children are directed immediately to "real text" such as newspapers or magazines or books to search for other words that follow that pattern. When children understand that a sequence of letters is going to show up many many times in their reading, the whole task of learning to read will not seem so difficult. Although there are myriad spellings, there is a very limited number of sound spellings. For this reason, using the skills of sound awareness (words are made of them! not letter names) and the skill of knowing the sound spellings, the process of reading is greatly demystified for the child.

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Easy-for-Me™ Supports the Teacher in Small Group Instruction

Teaching in small groups maximizes learning for all children for many reasons. The teaching can be planned to match the needs of the group, focus and attention is ensured, teacher will be able to observe needs and abilities much more readily, each child will be able to practice the skills taught, and the teacher will be able to listen to each child read. We have made the format of our lessons with the goal in mind of taking a lot of the work out of teaching in small groups by providing a plan and reproducible resources for the busy teacher to use. See centers in Lessons below:

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Easy-for-Me™ Provides Skills Tracking Forms and Assessments

We have a skills tracking form for each of the three sections in the Teaching Manual. These serve as easy-to-use records on each child, and best of all, when it is report card time, just photocopy the page and send it home to the parents so they will see specifically how their child is doing!
What I love about the skill tracking form is that the focus becomes "what do I need to re-teach or teach in a new way so that this gap is filled for Johnny?" The focus turns away from just getting through the lesson, and towards bringing EVERY child into success.

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Easy-for-Me™ Provides 180 Pages of Reproducible Resources

Activities for centers, cross-curricular activies and information, comprehension activities, reading follow-up, picture cards for each letter of the alphabet, story sequencing, games, and so much more. Every lesson has resources provided!
There are not only activities for teaching sight words, but there are word wall activities, and comprehension activities. Having the Easy-for-Me™ Teaching Manual is like having two whole books in one.

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