EIR Program:
Teachers in grades K-6, instructed in EIRŪ and supported over a school year in cohorts, provide 20 minutes of daily instruction to groups of five to seven students who need more guidance from the teacher in learning to read.
In kindergarten the program is based on whole-class instruction with small-group follow-up for the children lowest in oral language and emergent literacy abilities. Activities include listening to stories for enjoyment, discussion of these stories related to children's lives, creative dramatics, emergent literacy development (concepts of print, rhyme, phonemic segmentation and blending, letter and sound recognition), with an emphasis on exposure-not mastery.
In grades 1 and 2 this instruction follows a routine and regular pace with regular monitoring of progress, and includes repeated reading of familiar stories, coached reading of a new story, phonemic awareness training and systematic phonics instruction, guided sentence writing, vocabulary and comprehension instruction. The teacher focuses on coaching the children in strategies that will make them become independent readers.
The grade 3 and 4 programs provide 20 minutes of small-group instruction four days a week using narrative and informational picture books and focusing on attacking multisyllabic words and fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies. In grade 4 children learn to use the reciprocal teaching model. On the fourth day, the children read their picture book to a younger child who is in the grade 1 or 2 EIRŪ program and they also coach these younger children as they read their EIRŪ story.
For more program information, please contact Ceil Critchley by telephone at 763-785-0701 or by email at ccritchley@comcast.net