WordFlight complements your literacy intervention programs.
Whether you call the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) a framework, model, or process, WordFlight effectively supports your literacy intervention programs at Tier 2 or Tier 3—or even all students in Tier 1 for grades 2-3 in elementary school.
The WordFlight tools support all tiers of learners.
WordFlight is built to help all students develop essential reading skills—whether they are just beginning to develop the skills or they are learners who have gaps in their reading profiles. The WordFlight Instructional Program is typically used as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 tool. But, it is also a good fit for Tier 1 instruction for students in grades 2-3.Learn about Tier 3 Individual Instruction
Educators can pair the online learning experience with educator-facilitated one-on-one instruction for blended learning to extend, reinforce, and deepen the learning. We offer curriculum guides and lesson plans to support explicit instruction for up to five days per week of teacher-delivered sessions. In addition, online reports allow teachers to accurately monitor students and continue to target instruction.
Learn about Tier 2 Targeted Instruction
Teachers have flexibility in how they implement WordFlight. They can use the curriculum guides and lesson plans in small group settings in addition to the online learning.
Learn about Tier 1 Universal Instruction
Teachers can also use WordFlight for their whole class in grades 2-3. By differentiating and adapting to each student’s needs, WordFlight online instruction provides the right practice at the right time.
WordFlight fits into your Multi-Tiered System of Supports
WordFlight is an online assessment and literacy intervention solution for students in grades 2-8 who cannot achieve reading fluency and comprehension because of deficits in their foundational skills.
WordFlight has the necessary elements to work within your MTSS program:
Screening
WordFlight provides early identification to see which students are struggling with essential, basic reading skills. The 20-25 minute online screener identifies students who likely have deficits in foundational reading skills and qualify for literacy intervention programs.
To provide educators with even more information about students’ foundational reading skills, the detailed profile from the WordFlight Diagnostic provides visibility into each student’s development of decoding, generalization, and automatic word recognition.
Frequent monitoring of students’ progress
Educators have access to on-demand reports of students’ usage and progress on each activity. Educators can also use the reports to engage families in understanding their child’s learning journey as they progress through WordFlight.
Increasing levels of targeted support for those who are struggling
The personalized and differentiated instruction meets the individual needs of both developing students and those struggling with foundational reading skills. Built on more than a decade of research and development, WordFlight fills gaps in students’ knowledge and use of phonics, systematically developing their ability to generalize and apply that knowledge to support automatic word recognition and fluency. Additionally, the online system provides diagnostic and ongoing formative assessment as the student progresses.
Professional development
WordFlight includes professional learning throughout the school year to:
- Discuss obstacles many students face in becoming proficient readers.
- Help teachers and administrators make data-driven instructional decisions.
- Enable teachers to fully implement the program with fidelity.
The use of evidence-based processes and strategies at every tier of support
WordFlight is different from other personalized and adaptive solutions that just depend on an algorithm. It incorporates the science of how students learn to become skilled readers from decades of research from cognitive science. WordFlight supports the needs of diverse learners in your literacy intervention programs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why automatic word recognition?
Fluent readers go beyond decoding skills to automatically and effortlessly recognize words (Oslund et al., 2018). They can process large quantities of text quickly, with little conscious processing of letter-to-sound mappings.
When word recognition skills become automatic, readers can focus on comprehending, or understanding the meaning of the text, which is the goal of reading. That’s when stories come to life and students learn to love reading and get their academic career on track.
Automatic word recognition is an essential prerequisite for students to reach fluency and is the critical predictor of fluency (Roembke et al., 2019). But, it is often overlooked in traditional assessment and instruction. WordFlight is the first and only validated solution that assesses automatic word recognition and has proven to build automatic word recognition as gaps in decoding skills are filled.
Does WordFlight support students with dyslexia?
Teachers using WordFlight are able to better support all students in their classrooms, including students who have been hard to reach in the past because of learning disabilities. Many students who have been diagnosed with dyslexia have benefitted from using WordFlight.
Learn more about the science of how WordFlight helps students with dyslexia.
What students could benefit from WordFlight?
WordFlight helps students in grades 3-8 who:
- Struggle with comprehension and fluency because of deficits in foundational skills
- Read slowly, with great effort and difficulty
- Struggle with decoding
- Are unable to easily identify and distinguish vowels
- Do not understand how syllables work or have difficulty breaking words into syllables
- Cannot quickly and automatically apply and generalize knowledge of phonics to new words or to connected text
- Have difficulty spelling
For students in grades 2-3, WordFlight helps build foundational skills, including automatic word recognition, from the very start.
Does WordFlight support English language learners?
WordFlight provides experiences at the phoneme, syllable, phrase, and paragraph levels that support oral and written language development—an understanding of the structure of English and foundational reading development.
In addition, the tens of thousands of oral and print experiences delivered privately allow students to repeatedly explore the language and the links between sound and print. This varied and systematic practice allows students to gain competence and confidence with the meaning and structure of English through varied and increasingly difficult experiences with words and their parts.
How much time should be dedicated to WordFlight each week?
Students get the best results in a WordFlight’s literacy intervention program when they use the online instructional program 20 minutes per day four or five days per week, with a goal of 60-80 minutes per week.
We do not recommend using the online component more than 125 minutes per week.
How long does it take to see results?
WordFlight accelerates learning so students become proficient in foundational reading skills in less than a school year with 20-minute daily sessions four to five times a week.
If a school or district starts their implementation by September, they have adequate runway to complete the entire program within a typical school year, wrapping up in early-to-mid-May.
WordFight is aligned with the Science of Reading and the principles underlying Structured Literacy
Systematic phonics instruction is a necessary component to an effective literacy program, but more systematic practice is required to help students read with fluency and comprehension.
Evidence shows that a form of structured practice designed to build automatic word recognition is a critical step in preparing students to become fluent readers. WordFlight provides that structured practice by using the principles of the Varied Practice Model, which emphasizes systematic variation in the learning process (Arciuli, 2018).
Following this model, WordFlight’s online instructional program varies tasks, providing multiple levels of difficulty, interweaving content, and giving immediate feedback so that students learn to apply their skills across many contexts. WordFlight gives students thousands, if not tens of thousands of experiences, with the “rules” of phonics to help them develop automatic word recognition.
Wordflight is easy to use for both educators and students
Teachers have flexibility in how they implement WordFlight, enabling them to adjust how and when they use it.
- For example, some schools dedicate 20 minutes of class time for every student to use it while others have instructional coaches use it during their intervention time.
- WordFlight enables blended learning through teacher-facilitated instruction that supports and reinforces the online lessons.
References
Arciuli, J. (2018). Reading as Statistical Learning. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 49(3S): 634.
Oslund, E. L., Clemens, N. H., Simmons, D. C., & Simmons, L. E. (2018). The direct and indirect effects of word reading and vocabulary on adolescents’ reading comprehension: Comparing struggling and adequate comprehenders. Reading and Writing, 31(2), 355—379.
Roembke, T. C., Hazeltine, E., Reed, D. K., & McMurray, B. (2019). Automaticity of word recognition is a unique predictor of reading fluency in middle-school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 314–330.