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Reading Support Program

The Reading Support Program is designed for students who are reading significantly below grade level and who lack the ability to sound out (decode) unfamiliar words for reading and spelling.

The reading support program is not appropriate for students for whom reading comprehension, rather than decoding, is the primary area of need.

Using the Wilson Reading System, a multi-sensory phonics-based program developed especially for older students by reading experts at the Reading Clinic at the Massachusetts General Hospital, students are explicitly taught the rules and patterns that govern the underlying structure of the English language.

Students Learn:

• The sounds letters and high frequency letter combinations make

• How to know what sound the vowel makes

• How to break longer words down into smaller parts (e.g. syllables or baseword and suffix) to facilitate reading and spelling.

• Strategies for remembering high frequency “sight words” (e.g. words that cannot be sounded out phonetically such as “ receive” or “why”)

• Spelling options for letters that have multiple sounds (e.g. the letter c can make a “soft” s sound or a “hard” k sound)

• Strategies for increasing reading fluency