SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible® Propel Beginning & Striving Readers to Foundational Reading Mastery

Orton-Gillingham-based, hands-on, structured literacy instruction, and easy-to-follow 5-step lessons in phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, academic vocabulary, and handwriting, promote foundational literacy success. Use independently or as the foundational level of SPIRE®.

  • Phonemic Awareness / Reading Intervention
  • PreK–4
  • Tiers 1, 2, & 3
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Phonological Awareness and Phonics for Reading Readiness

SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible® provides hands-on instruction in phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and understanding letter-sound relationships, as well as handwriting for beginning or striving readers. The 5-step lessons follow a structured literacy approach, helping students quickly master 20 consonants and short a.

When used in an intervention setting, SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible serves as the Foundational level to SPIRE.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Through Instruction, Practice, & Assessment

Instruction

Each letter or concept is taught through an introductory lesson, a reinforcement lesson that reviews all previous concepts, and another optional reinforcement lesson for those students who are still struggling with the concept.

Lesson Steps:

  1. Listening: focuses attention on sounds in words to develop listening skills, background knowledge, and understanding of print concepts.
  2. Rhyming: develops ability to identify and manipulate rhyme through rhyme identification, categorization, and matching.
  3. Segmentation: develops awareness of 1:1 correspondence between spoken and written words. Segmentation and deletion activities progress from sentence to compound words, to syllables, to phonemes.
  4. Phoneme-Grapheme Relationships: teach letter names, their sounds, and the correct form for printing. 
  5. Dictation: develops ability to connect each phoneme to its symbol in written form.

Teacher's Guide includes a quick reference for all materials and activities.
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Practice

All materials needed for implementation of the program are included in the SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible Kit:

  • Teacher's Guide with Blackline Masters
  • Traffic Light Handwriting Chart (Teacher and Student version, 1 copy each)
  • Instructional Cards
  • Sound and Rhyme Mats, Game Cards, and Manipulatives.

Add optional consumable student workbooks to:

  • Organize student work
  • Promote ease of use
  • Reduce instructor preparation time

Assessment

  • The program provides opportunity for ongoing assessment through classroom observation and lesson dictation.
  • Concept Assessments review student identification of the most recently taught letters and their sounds, and student ability to produce their written forms.
  • Cumulative Assessments are designed to serve a summative function. These assessments not only gauge student knowledge of all letters and sounds previously taught, they also measure student awareness of rhyming sounds – a key component of phonological awareness.
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SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible Highlights

  • Teaches phonemic awareness and phonics for beginning or striving readers.
  • For beginning readers — instruction builds the foundational skills of reading to promote reading success.
  • For striving readers — this Orton-Gillingham-based reading intervention for any grade level serves as Pre-Level 1 of the SPIRE program.
  • Rhyming activities and systematic segmentation instruction develop phonological awareness.
  • Explicit phonics instruction is provided through repeated practice, games, and multisensory activities.
  • As students learn each letter and its sound, they also learn and practice how to form the letter.
  • SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible Kit provides all materials needed for implementation.

Resources

Program Overviews

Sample Lessons

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