The OnTrack Junior High Phonics Course
Today marks the start of the posting of the Junior High Phonics Course to the Guide located on the Sidebar. It’s located well down the list below Tidbits.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to lay out a junior high (or high school) phonics curriculum that flows naturally from the OnTrack Reading curriculum and which could be used by teachers in any content area to polish up the phonics skills of their weaker readers. One comment I hear consistently from teachers is a frustration over the inability of their weaker readers to handle the content area reading required to learn the subject matter they are trying to teach.
I believe that the strongest element of the OnTrack Reading curriculum is the approach that I’ve developed to explain the decoding of unfamiliar multisyllable words to struggling readers. Most junior high and high school students who struggle with reading have developed rudimentary reading skills by that time and have become comfortable with frequently encountered words. The problem is that they have no secure strategy for approaching longer, more complex word and so they just guess, usually by picking a word from their listening vocabulary that has structural similarities to the unfamiliar word on the page. This strategy makes it almost impossible for them to read unfamiliar science, math and social studies terms they encounter in their reading, because they are not in their listening vocabulary yet.
What I am calling the OnTrack Junior High Phonics Course will be described in a series of lesson plans over the next few weeks (if all goes as planned.) So far, all that has been completed is the introductory Page at Junior High Phonics Course.