Lift-Off for Early Literacy: Directed Reading Opportunities for Struggling Students

As early as preschool, children who struggle with emergent literacy skills can benefit from effective response to intervention. Don't wait until later grades when they've already fallen behind—improve their literacy skills now with this evidence-based Tier 2 RTI curriculum, ready for any pre-K educator to pick up and use right away.

Created by teachers for teachers, this activity-based curriculum is based on Project Early ID, a successful pilot program that's been improving reading outcomes in Baltimore public schools since 2005. Expertly organizing their lessons into one hands-on, step-by-step guide, the authors give teachers, SLPs, and paraprofessionals eleven complete units of small-group instruction (see sidebar). Educators can use this curriculum with confidence because it

• Is proven effective. Follow-up studies of achievement tests show that the lessons helped increase the percentage of first-grade students reading at grade level to at least 90%.
• Includes verbatim, step-by-step scripts, so any education professional in the pre-K classroom can replicate the authors' success.
• Starts earlier than other curricula. Unlike most reading interventions, this curriculum starts in pre-K-early enough to help struggling students before they fail.
• Lays the foundation for success in the Big Five components identified by the National Reading Panel, especially phonics, phoneme awareness, and vocabulary
• Meets IDEA requirements for providing high quality, evidence-based, differentiated instruction to at-risk students.
• Takes just 20-30 minutes a day, ideal for the shorter attention spans of young children
• Addresses the smallest steps of skill acquisition, critical for pinpointing the source of a child's reading difficulty and providing explicit, targeted instruction
• Works with any other curriculum. Lessons can easily be "dropped" right into any pre-K core curriculum to support struggling learners.

Young children will love the engaging activity sets, filled with songs, stories, fingerplays, rhymes, and games that help increase their reading readiness while they have fun. And all adults involved in pre-K instruction—from teachers to classroom volunteers—will love how this curriculum helps them make the most of their classroom time and get real, measurable results. With this highly effective, teacher-friendly curriculum, pre-K educators will help struggling students achieve "literacy lift-off" as early as possible so they're ready for long-term reading success.

A featured book in our Launching Literacy Kit!

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Charlene Iannone-Campbell, M.A., C.A.S.E., NBCT, is Director of Early Learning for Baltimore City Public Schools. She is dedicated to urban education and is passionate about providing excellent preschool resources to Baltimore’s youngest learners and their families. She has been an educator for 18 years and has served as a classroom teacher, special educator, department head, reading specialist, and mentor-teacher.

Susan Lloyd Lattimore, Ed.M., M.S., has worked with Baltimore City Public School children since 1975 as a special educator, reading specialist, and early literacy teacher leader. Her concern for the plight of struggling readers led her and a team of dedicated colleagues to launch Project Early ID, a response to intervention pilot program that became the basis for this book. From 2005 to 2010, she served as Director of the project, which identifies and addresses early indicators of reading difficulties.

Linda Baker, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.