SPIRE Foundations: Sounds Sensible

Phonemic Awareness / Reading Intervention
PreK–4
Tiers 1, 2 & 3
Print Format

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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:

Listening: focuses attention on sounds in words to develop listening skills, background knowledge, and understanding of print concepts.
Rhyming: develops ability to identify and manipulate rhyme through rhyme identification, categorization, and matching.
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.
Phoneme-Grapheme Relationships: teach letter names, their sounds, and the correct form for printing.
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.

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.