Sharp Reading - Seven Plus Intervention For Struggling Older Readers

 I have had the privilege of being trained in the Seven Plus intervention program for struggling older readers. The intervention is designed to run for 8 - 10 weeks, each lesson about 15 - 20 minutes and in small groups, perfect for 1 on 1.

The focus for the intervention is fluency, vocabulary, and decoding strategies (this is where the explicit instruction takes place).

The key concepts of the intervention are:

1) Scanning Multisyllabic Words - train the brain to look for and identify manageable chunks of visual information as the reader is reading and eradicating default decoding strategies such as guessing or sampling

2) A Top-Down Approach - we start with syllabification, then develop knowledge of chunks, and then backfills any letter sound deficits

3) Students work on "Hard" text - hard text is scaffolded so that it never feels hard, the text provides rich vocabulary opportunities, success on "hard" text is very motivating, only one paragraph per lesson so the learner is not overwhelmed. 

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO STICK TO THE ROUTINE!

My training consisted of a one on one online training session with Hilton. My first job was to then do an assessment with the identified students in order to grade them into levels. Luckily the BURT testing was already done by management so I could go straight into the assessment for Seven Plus. 

Then I had a go at doing a lesson. It was really good that I did the lesson as it was a bit trickier than I thought, and while everything was fresh in my mind, it gave me a chance to organize everything in my mind. It also gave me the opportunity to ask Hilton a few questions. 

I've completed my online training as far as I can with syllabification. I look forward to seeing how this intervention will help our struggling students to accelerate in their reading. 

The next time Hilton and I meet up, we will be looking at chunking.