It’s difficult to find a phonics program that includes all the elements I list as critical for teaching struggling readers, especially one that can be used with a class and not just one-on-one. (See notes about “Phonics First” under “Seminars” on the horizontal menu at the top of the page.) Zoophonics is such a program. Not only is it multi-sensory, simultaneous instruction; it has all the other characteristics as well. It starts with animal drawings in the shape of letters, then superimposes the black lines of the letter forms on top of the pictures, and finally shows only the black lines forming letters. Struggling Readers can usually remember pictures more easily than black squiggly lines. Zoophonics really works for emergent readers in Kindergarten, but what about older kids?

My first year as a reading specialist gave me an opportunity to try it out. I met about 25 students each in two schools for 30 minutes twice a week in small groups of no more than eight. I focused on increasing their phonemic awareness and used the DIBELS* Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)*, the Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)*, and the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)* tests as pre- and post-data.

All my students had scored at the “Intensive” level in the fall. Some were already identified with IEP’s* in the resource room. I broke out that information below because they were the most severely learning-disabled students in the primary classes and still made good improvement.

DIBELS

First Grade (7 students)

• Gain in Phonemic Segmentation Fluency = +24 words
• Gain in Nonsense Word Fluency = +48 words
• Gain in Oral Reading Fluency = +19 words
• All of the students Exceeded Standard in PSF and NWF. In ORF, 2 Met Benchmark*, 4 raised their score to Strategic*, and only 1 was still at Intensive*.

Second Grade not on IEP (7 students)

• Gain in Oral Reading Fluency = +40 words
• Out of the seven, 1 Met Benchmark, 3 raised thier score to Strategic, and 3 were still Intensive.

Second Grade on IEP (8 students)

• Gain in Oral Reading Fluency = +21 words
• Out of the 8, 1 Met Benchmark, the rest remained at Intensive.

Third Grade on IEP (3 students)

• Gain in Oral Reading Fluency = +22 words
• All remained at Intensive.

The results show that the earlier an intervention is used, the better the result. But even though it doesn’t look like my older kids improved, there were very good gains in willingness to decode any word. This went a long way to help their comprehension, as shown on the statewide reading test. I have found that Oral Reading Fluency is the last score to improve when struggling readers start reading.

STAR READING TEST – Advantage Learning Systems

First Grade (7 students)

• Percentile ranking increased by 16 percentage points
• Independent Reading Level* (IRL) increased +1.6 grades

Second Grade not on IEP (7 students)

• Percentile ranking increased by 25 percentage points
• Independent Reading Level (IRL) increased +2.4 grades

Second Grade on IEP (8 students)

• Percentile ranking increased by 2 percentage points
• Independent Reading Level (IRL) increased +.4 grades

Third Grade on IEP (3 students)

• Percentile ranking increased by 9 percentage points
• Independent Reading Level (IRL) increased +1.1 grades

* See Glossary