WE INTRODUCE MULTIPLE SOUNDS

Students learn all of the sounds of a letter or phonogram at once, encouraging students to try sounds as they decode, and accelerating reading.

How This Benefits the Student:

• Reduces confusion by introducing all the sounds at once, rather than over a period of time
• Encourages actively trying sounds to decode
• Builds decoding confidence

WE TEACH MULTIPLE-LETTER PHONOGRAMS

Students will learn sounds for multiple-letter phonograms such as “dge” or “ai” or “igh.” These additional phonograms provide a broad and solid system of sounds available for decoding.

How This Benefits the Student:

• Phonograms promote amazing spelling skills
• The phonograms build faster decoding / reading speeds
• Phonograms are more reliable for decoding than old-school rules that are broken more often than kept
• More difficult words can be broken into readable segments, such as knight

STUDENTS SPEAK, WRITE & SEE

Students should be encouraged to speak the letter or phonogram as they write it, and as they create the letter on paper, they are seeing it.

How This Benefits the Student:

• Seeing, saying, writing all together accesses several of the intelligences of students (visual, auditory, bodily-kinesthetic)
• Offers better initial imprinting
• Supports easier learning retention

WE PROVIDE SMALL-LINED PAPER

Student handwriting sheets and workbooks are size-optimized to utilize fine motor skills. Overly large lines use major muscle groups, which thwarts the development of the correct skills.

How This Benefits the Student:

• Provides solid fine-motor practice from the very beginning
• Helps students train early in key letter formation skills
• Correct formation skills are honed when there is not a lot of room for error

As early readers learn letters and phonograms, words in workbooks and stories are carefully chosen for easy, reliable decoding. Words are selected to step your student forward slowly at first to build confidence. As students progress, new words stretch their skills.

We encourage writing practice! When students write they use their kinesthetic learning center which is proven to help students retain information. It also develops your child's fine-motor skills.

However, we design our handwriting to be flexible. This means that you can go at your child's pace. Some early readers love handwriting, but there are some who handwriting just becomes a frustration.

Handwriting in Pine Hollow is designed in 3 ways to help your early readers at their own pace! 

1. Handwriting is limited in our workbooks
2. Handwriting is put into a separate resource
3. Prompts to draw answers also develop fine motor skills

Our approach to spelling is full of fun active learning activities to help your young reader with their spelling!

Spelling is encouraged throughout all of the Pine Hollow Reading Programs. This is done through fun activity suggestions that help your child engage each week with their spelling assignments. Spelling practice will look different depending on where your student is at in the reading journey! Spelling will be very informal at the beginning of Letters to Little Words and will become more formal once they learn the letters of the alphabet. We encourage our parents to start helping their children sound out words and begin slowly spelling the words they are working on throughout the week. We also encourage our young learners to begin practicing sight words throughout our early programs! There are loads of game ideas to help your young reader practice spelling their sight words!

Once your early reader masters their alphabet and many of the phonograms, Pine Hollow's encourages you to start focusing on increasing reading fluency, comprehension and speed.

We add the following to help your early reader:

• Questions regarding what students read
• Gradual lengthening of stories
• Gradual changing of the font size
• Increase of plot complexity
• Lengthening the time between reading the story and asking questions regarding specific plot points