KIPP Delta Elementary Literacy Academy in Arkansas and E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. have turned to Lexia Reading Core5™ to help students build foundational literacy skills.
Lexia Reading Core5 is a cloud-based pre-K–5 technology-based reading program that provides instruction to help students achieve reading proficiency with increasingly challenging reading content.
“We were struggling to find just the right product to support our students and our teachers,” said KIPP Delta assistant principal, John Bennetts. “Lexia Reading Core5 is masterful in the way it keeps the kids engaged at just the right level to accelerate their reading skills while giving our teachers and classroom volunteers resources, like scripted lessons, that go right to the heart of a particular skill or activity that a student or a group of students had found to be a real stumbling block. You can tell a great deal of research went in to its development.”
Lexia Reading Core5 covers six areas of reading: phonological awareness, phonics, structural analysis, vocabulary, automaticity and comprehension for all abilities through grade five.
For administrators at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, Lexia Reading Core5 is being added as an intervention resource for Tier II students in grades one through four. The school decided to implement the program after seeing older students make significant gains using Lexia’s program designed for remedial students in grades 6 and above, called Lexia Strategies™.
“We saw many of our struggling readers in grades six through eight gain almost two years of growth after just one year of using Lexia with fidelity in our blended learning literacy lab,” said Jeanne Chang, director of technology innovation. “What we like about Lexia is that it provides the opportunity to practice and develop foundational literacy skills such as decoding and phonics while building vocabulary, so students can access increasingly challenging texts. The reports give teachers strategic insights about the specific support students need to close individual skill gaps, and the program includes corresponding resources to facilitate this instruction.”
Students work independently in 18 levels of self-paced activities that take them on adventures around the world. Throughout the program, students interact with complex text as they develop literacy, listening and reading comprehension skills.
If a student struggles with a particular activity, he or she is presented with a scaffolded approach to mastering the relevant skill. If the student continues to struggle, he or she receives skill-specific instruction online, and if necessary, teacher-led instruction using Lexia’s scripted lesson materials.
As students work in the program, Lexia’s proprietary technology found in its Assessment Without Testing®system gathers norm-referenced performance data and adjusts each student’s learning path accordingly. Teachers and administrators receive real-time reports on individual student progress toward mastery on the Common Core State Standards as well as reports indicating each student’s probability of meeting end-of-year, grade-level benchmarks. The system also generates individualized action plans recommending structured lessons and the proper intensity of instruction necessary to improve student performance and meet benchmarks.
Chang added, “This program, coupled with our teachers’ experience, puts together the best resources for building the foundational skills that are required for significant academic gains to take root.”
