This course is for instructors whose students are learning how to read. It is an intensive, systematic, phonetic, structured evidenced-based approach to decoding and word recognition. Instructors will learn how to use multi sensory visual, interactive, tactile, auditory learning strategies to help students overcome reading difficulties. For example, teachers will learn how to engage students in exciting, effective ways by helping them to sound, say, and sing syllabic and phonemic sounds.

Ultimately, this is a speech to print course. Students will build foundations for excellence in reading and writing by learning how to spell phonemic and syllabic sounds and write them down. In other words, students will learn how to spell well to read well.The course content includes the following:

Levels 1-3

• An introduction to the Science of Reading made simple: What every reading teacher needs to know about how the brain learns to read
• An introduction to the Science of Spelling made simple: what every reading teacher needs to know about how systematic spelling instruction enhances reading instruction
• Instructors will learn:
• How to help students master the alphabetic principle
• How to help students build phonemic awareness through auditory training
• How to help students master phonetic elements through simple syllables
• How to help students develop phonemic analysis through syllabic segmentation
• How to help students build words by using the most essential syllabic patterns such as CVC and VCE words

Level 4

In this section, instructors will learn how to teach students multi-letter sounds such as blends and digraphs. These sound clusters are important because they appear at the beginning and at the end of words. Knowing how to say and spell consonant and vowel clusters provides students with an invaluable key for decoding words.

Level 5

Level 5 introduces students to the long vowel sounds and advanced multi-letter sounds.

English has 15 vowel sounds and 28 different ways to spell those sounds. This presents great difficulty for both teachers and students. This course will help instructors to show their students how to say the vowel sounds and spell all of the various phonograms that represent those sounds so that students can speak, read, and write with greater accuracy.

This course consists of over 100 self-teaching videos, which help students to master critical consonant structures, and digital quizzes, which help students to develop their spelling abilities.

Upon completion of this course, educators will receive certification from ScholarSkills as a Level One Orton-Gillingham STAR Instructor. STAR is our acronym for Systematic Training in Analytical Reading. This level one certification means that instructors have been intensively trained in the use of multi-sensory tools to teach and remediate students in foundational reading skills.

Because of its interactive nature, this course will continue on our Academy's Platform and LMS.