Literacy Interventions

Effective Instruction for Middle School Students with Reading Difficulties: The Reading Teacher's Sourcebook
(© 2007 University of Texas System/Texas Education Agency) gives a very comprehensive overview of literacy instruction and intervention strategies and how to use assessments to select them.

Multicultural Educational Services, sponsored by the Minnesota Literacy Council and LDA Minnesota, contains a variety of downloadable ESL literacy development materials as well as online activities.  These include adult phonics stories, literacy exercises drawn from real-life tasks, flash card exercises  and  phonics exercises for pre-literate students, online "prepositions in English" flash activities, and other activities for students with limited English and/or first language literacy.

Balanced Literacy Diet is a website with helpful strategies and advice for teaching the main "ingredients" of literacy: Motivation for Literacy, Oral Language, Knowledge Building, Concepts of Print, Writing Conventions, Phonemic Awareness, Letter-Sounds & Phonics, Spelling & Word Study, Vocabulary, Reading Fluency & Expression, Reading Comprehension Strategies, Writing Processes & Strategies, and Text Structures & Genres.  It is oriented toward elementary classrooms, but the "How To" videos, articles, and links provide clear information that is easily adaptable to older children.

FreeReading is a high quality, open-source, free reading intervention program designed for pre-k to grade 6 children.  It has downloadable lessons and materials for phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and writing.

Increasing Your Child's Reading Fluency is a package developed by the University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning (CTL) Reading Clinic to help parents in tutoring their children in developing reading fluency.  The straightforward presentation of terms and concepts and the helpful links to resources makes this a good resource for teachers as well.

Precision Reading is an intervention program developed by Dr. Rick Freeze, Professor of Inclusive Special Education at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Education.  It is a one-on-one instructional activity that takes only five minutes per day with most students and uses adapted classroom reading materials.  Jigsaw Learning provides an overview of how to use it as their sample literacy intervention.

Intervention Central is a website with a variety of tools and resources to help in implementing a Response to Intervention model.  One tool that Horizon teachers seem to find particularly useful is the Oral Reading Fluency Passage Generator.

HELPS (Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies)  programs integrate easy-to-use instructional strategies that are specifically designed to improve students reading fluency.  The website has a free downloadable teachers guide free downloadable teaching materials.