New Decoding and Phonics Anchor Pages for Secondary Students
Anchor Pages have always been about making foundational skills and standards an instructional priority. They include incremental learning targets that build towards a goal by providing learning objectives that help students practice transferrable skills. One of the best parts about Anchor Pages is that they include assessments and instructional resources that teachers can use to help them deliver rigorous instruction and monitor progress.
The newest release of Anchor Pages is only scratching the surface for a critically important and often overlooked subject area and student group: reading foundational goals for secondary students connected to decoding and phonics.
What Makes Reading Foundations Content for Secondary Students Unique?
Phonics, decoding, and fluency are skills that are taught almost exclusively in lower grades and the assumption is that students in middle and high school have learned all of that prior to entering middle or high school. What we have found is that is simply not the case, there are students in higher grades who need support with foundational reading skills. This release is to help teachers who may not be well-trained in teaching phonics, decoding, and fluency or teachers who report that there aren’t enough grade level appropriate resources available to focus on these skills.
Our team has designed these Anchor Pages in such a way that they are legally compliant with IDEA, which means the goals and objectives are grade-level and standards-aligned. We were also sure to focus on the skills that secondary teachers identify as most important when it comes to reading foundations:
- Student independence when reading grade-level texts,
- Students making significant gains in skill areas for which they are 3 or more grade levels behind
Logically Scaffold Foundational Reading Skills
This release consists of two pages that help teachers accomplish both of the above goals. The Read Multisyllabic Words in Adapted Grade-Level Texts Anchor Page is about student independence and this is highlighted by the strategies found throughout the page. Some examples of these strategies are reading grade-level passages alongside students even when they’re difficult, engaging in repeated readings of the same passage, choral reading, and teacher-modeled reading.
The Decode CVC & CVCe Words in Adapted Grade-Level Texts Anchor Page is about explicit skill building in areas where students are multiple grade levels behind. In this case, the skill is decoding CVC and CVE words. We incorporated concrete and visual strategies into this page like using counters and Elknonin Boxes for segmentation. This ensures that students can firmly grasp the skills and concepts.
As we continue to design reading foundations Anchor Pages for secondary students, we are committed to using the lenses of student independence and skill building. Our goal is to make some headway in the area of fluency in the coming months.
Use Them Now!
- Decode CVC & CVCe Words in Adapted Grade-Level Texts
- Read Multisyllabic Words in Adapted Grade-Level Texts
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