By Cari Miller, Director, Reading First Just Read, Florida!
The Remediation Plus intervention program is a multisensory, systematic, phonics curriculum for all ages of students who struggle with reading, spelling, and or handwriting due to LD, dyslexia, or reading lag. Taught to mastery, everyday (45 min) to 1 to 3 students by teacher trained in the program.
R+ is based on five resources of reading research from:
- National Institute of Health
- Pat and Charles Lindamood
- Combining Lindamood theory with kinesthetic, tactile, and speech
- Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham
- Beth Slingerland- “Slingerland handwriting”
A complete battery of assessments are given to all students, not for placement, everyone starts on either lesson 1 or 2(if student can already blend) but for teaching (prescriptive), so that the teacher knows each students strengths/weaknesses.
The lesson format is approximately 45 minutes each and includes:
- Direct instruction (scripted) of phonological awareness, spelling rule, or syllable instruction begins each lesson.
- Visual Drill (Orton- Gillingham) students look at 12 phonemes, then one at a time state the sound, think of a word in which the sound is used in this way (e.g., or for corn).
- Auditory drill (Orton-Gillingham) Teacher says the sound, students write what he hears on paper.
- Phoneme Segmentation & Sequencing (Lindamood Bell) Use colored tiles or magnets to think about how many phonemes are in words.
- Sound Manipulation Exercises (linguistic gymnastics—phoneme manipulation
- Blending with the ball- use the ball to roll to the student as the teacher segments and states the sound then the student rolls it back as they repeat the sound. A rice tray is kept on the table for students who have trouble blending the sounds and executing the phoneme grapheme correspondence in their minds…then they can write them in the rice tray where they can read them as they say them.
- Finger spelling (Orton- Gillingham) students finger taps one sound at a time before writing.
- Review - say, write words to mastery – use mirror to see how mouth changes if confusion between vowels
- Dictation of Sentences- 2 to 4 sentences provided in each lesson plan
- Reading of Word Lists – frequent re-reading of word lists to improve automaticity. Teacher photocopies word list daily, >85 lists in binder, eventually.
- Controlled Reading – use only controlled readers until after lesson 6 in the advanced binder – 31 language concepts have been learned by this time so the student is now able to segment new words.
- A quick search provided no empirical research for this program. However, the design of the program is based on research.
- There were no weaknesses noted.
