How it Works

In order to give every student in our care the tools and the confidence to reach their reading goals, our program focuses on building phonological and phonemic awareness - literacy skills that are seldom taught in schools.

Program Structure

1. Phonological Awareness

Our program begins by strengthening the ability to understand and manipulate pieces of oral language, particularly words and syllables. We do this on an auditory, tactile, and visual level, but without letters of any kind.

2. Phonemic Awareness

As students become comfortable with manipulating words and syllables without the use of letters, we simultaneously hone their ability to manipulate individual sounds within spoken words. Students learn to perceive and correctly reproduce all sounds in the English language, and use manipulatives to blend, read, and spell words with those sounds.

3. Decoding Strategies

Once students are confident and secure in their phonological and phonemic awareness, we introduce letters as visual representations of the sounds they’ve been using. Students learn to sort vowel sounds into syllable families, and in turn use this knowledge to break multisyllabic words into decodable chunks. These skills allow students to confidently read new and unfamiliar words.

4. Knowledge of Spelling Rules

Research shows that reading and spelling success are strongly associated. We strengthen our students' encoding abilities by explicitly teaching essential spelling rules. To further enhance student confidence and remain committed to decodable text, we only teach spelling rules that are consistent and predictable.

5. Confidence and Self-efficacy

YokyWorks takes pride in individualizing our approach for each student and highlighting the strengths that make them unique. We take a genuine interest in our students and employ errorless instruction to build strong, trusting relationships. As their understanding grows throughout the program, so does their belief in themselves and their capabilities.

Testimonials

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