What are the components of the Early Reader Skills Scaffold?

When Reading Assistant (or a teacher) categorizes students as Early Readers (or Pre-Readers), these students will be given a series of practice activities known as the Early Reader Skills Scaffold (ERSS). These activities are heavily scaffolded and research based to provide significant support in improving the students' early literacy learning and development.

Each activity builds on the previous activities, affording the student opportunities to practice and develop key skills for reading mastery. Each activity is relatively short, featuring 4-7 targeted to items.

The sequence is designed to help students interact with the explicit letter/sound instruction productively. The activities start out at the easiest level and continue to build. There is repetition of words and sounds across the activities. Testing indicated that repetition helped students feel successful and maintain enthusiasm while encouraging the work of decoding.

Interventions and scoring differ depending on the activities in the ERSS.  

Interventions in the ERSS  for students can be:

Repeating and modeling

Or

Full interventions (meaning an additional activity to support instruction)

Or 

No intervention but encouragement from Reading Assistant to try again

The components of the Early Reader Skills Scaffold are as follows: 

This sequence of activities was designed with Dr. Katie Pace Miles and student testing in kindergarten and first grade classes. The sequence is designed to allow students to:

1. Start with explicit instruction and practice of a letter/sound correlation.

2. Easily practice by identifying and producing the sound in the Letter Flies activity.

3. Practice segmenting and blending without letter identification. The Up and Down activity does not have letters but allows students to segment a CVC word with the target sound that was initially taught in the first section.

4. Decode CVC words with the target sound using the scaffolds of a supportive Elkonin activity.

5. Continue practice with the target sound and decoding by changing just one part of a CVC word containing the target sound.

6. Show their development and learning by reading CVC words containing the target sound. Reading Assistant will scaffold and support with interventions if children are not able to read the words without an activity.

7. Practice reading simple sentences with the target sound and words they’ve recently attempted to read.

8. Repeat parts of the sequence or specific skills if a child shows struggle with a new sound.

Watch the video provided here, which demonstrates a set of tasks from the Early Reader Skills Scaffold, specifically designed for practicing the /a/ phoneme.

Below is the Early Reader Phonemic Scope and Sequence:

❗Note: Students on the Early Reader Skills Scaffold will not have the "See Your Progress" button in their Reading Assistant landing page.

Support