Teach to Mastery
Teach each lesson until students can decode words accurately, read words fluently, and spell words correctly in every lesson.
Decoding words accurately, reading words fluently, and spelling words correctly are the three most critical skill strands struggling readers must master. English is a phonetic language because of the fact that our letters each represent a specific sound or in some instances more than one sound. The decoding process consists of associating sounds with the already-known letters in the word and blending those sounds together to identify a word. Students must be directly taught the sound/symbol relationship of English letters, and they must learn this information to a point of automatic response. Learning the sound/symbol relationship of the alphabet is the absolute bedrock foundation of learning to read.
from Teacher’s Guide to We All Can Read Third Grade to Adult Edition
Learning the sound/symbol correspondence of English is the first step. Students must learn to read words accurately, and then over time through repeated exposure to print, read fluently. In fact oral reading fluency is the single best predictor of reading comprehension for students by the end of third grade. Students who read fluently read with a much higher degree of comprehension than do those students who continue to struggle to discover the identity of words they encounter in print.
The activity of spelling reverses this process. The identity of the word is already known; it is the spelling of the word that must be discovered. The student first identifies the number of sounds he hears in the dictated word and then tracks or represents those sounds by writing the letters of the alphabet which represent the various individual sounds he has identified within the dictated word. Spelling dictation is an intrinsic part of this phonics program; half of the instructional activity in this program consists of dictating the words from each lesson in the book to students. Students learn the direct and consistent relationship in English between letters and their sounds.