What is the Role of Phonics Intervention in Second and Third Grade Instruction?

Do you know that only about one percent of the population of early readers  are actually reading on grade level?  So that leaves 99 percent of the students that are sitting in today's classroom at-risk according to Pikulski & Tobin (1988) . In short, strategies have been developed for second graders and below teachers to follow.  However, many of our students are leaving the second grade without a clear understanding of phonics and how letters work together to form words.  So, I recommend teaching phonic with an intensive approach.  Here are a few suggestions:

• Spend a lot of time on specific sound.
• Using games
• Stopping Students as they read through a passage and point out certain connection  or the difference between a long a and a short a.
• Have the students to read the passage or story and pause to sound out the individual parts of a word.
• Test and Drill

Remember that phonics is the basic of learning to read.  It involves the process of decoding.