Oxton House Publishers, LLC

Reading Speed Drills

A typical speed drill:

Either set contains all the drills you need for any program; it’s just a matter of ease in finding the appro- priate drills for your students.  The Concept Phonics™ set includes some drills contrasting closed and magic-e words for each vowel because that program introduces the syllable structures together as concepts; those drills are not in the Multi-Sequence set.  

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The Concept Phonics™ Speed Drills  follow the sequence of that program.  The first drills contain both closed and magic-e syllables with a and then with i, with single consonants, SSCTs, and consonant blends.  Then the A  vowel-team words are added, then the V-R words, then closed and magic-e words with the other vowels, then their vowel-team words, and then the consonant-l-e words.  The phonetically irregular words are last.

The Multi-Sequence Speed Drills were designed in response to many requests from teachers who use one of the various Orton-Gillingham programs.  The closed syllables with all of the vowels come before the magic-e syllables.  Words with the vowel digraphs and diphthongs and with the vowel-r units are added in the most common sequence.  Consonant-l-e words and words with soft c and g come before the phonetically irregular words.

Many students who have difficulty learning to decode can readily learn the skills necessary to figure out individual words.  However, many of these students find it very hard to read words fast enough to comprehend the meaning of what they read, and after a page or two they are too exhausted to continue.  These students need to develop fluency in responding to print.  Reading Speed Drills help students develop automaticity at responding to the orthographic units that make up words and whole words.  This fluency transfers to reading new words.

There are two sequences of Speed Drills, so you can choose the sequence that best meets your teaching needs.  Both sequences cover the same content but in different orders.  Within each set, an individual drill contains only a small number of individual words repeated randomly in rows across the page.  This means that the student will read the same word many times within the minute of practice for that drill.  This is what develops automaticity on the words, changing them form decoding tasks to sight words.

What are Reading Speed Drills?