Research has long shown that well-designed, evidence-based core curriculum can help to improve and maintain a student's academic abilities. Research confirms that intervention must be frequent and intense in order to help children make gains when they are behind age- or grade-level. Our learning specialist, Staci Thompson, M.Ed., provides intensive individual direct instruction to children of all ages and grade levels in whatever academic area they are struggling. NNI uses SRA programs, Lindamood-Bell programs, the Orton-Gillingham-based Language! and Language Roots!, and REWARDS.

Per hour cost for all services is $75. However, because reading intervention must be intense in order to help children make progress, we ask that parents and children make a commitment to intensive and frequent intervention of at least one hour per day 3-5 days per week for 4-8 weeks. We understand that this is a big commitment of time and money and we stand by the results of this method in producing measurable reading progress. Research shows that the gap in phonemic decoding, reading accuracy, and comprehension can be substantially or completely closed by current interventions.

Leading literacy researcher, Dr. Joseph Torgeson, has stated that literacy includes five interactive skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and thinking strategies. Phonemic awareness helps children make accurate guesses when reading unfamiliar words. Accurate guesses in turn help to build a child's collection of "sight words," contributing to successful independent reading. Phonemic awareness further builds sight word vocabulary by providing recognizable phonemic structures that can be generalized to identify and spell additional words. The proportion of words students recognize by sight is a primary indicator of fluency. The National Reading Panel defines fluency as "the ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression." Dr. Torgeson says that instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are all vital aspects of early reading instruction.

SRA Reading Mastery
Research Support for Reading Mastery
Lindamood Bell LiPS and Visualizing and Verbalizing
REWARDS
Language for Learning
Language! and Language! Roots

Math
Spelling
Written Expression

About SRA Reading Mastery (see www.sraonline.com)
Reading Mastery uses the highly explicit, systematic approach of Direct Instruction to accelerate reading and helps students achieve a high rate of success. Reading Mastery addresses all five essential components of reading as identified by Reading First: phonemic awareness, phonics and word analysis, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program provides spelling instruction to help students make the connection between decoding and spelling patterns and direct instruction helps children to develop decoding, word recognition, and comprehension skills that transfer to other subject areas.

Research Support for Reading Mastery
Click here www.sraonline.com to read The Research Base for Reading Mastery by Eastern Washington University's Cheryl Schieffer, Nancy Marchand-Martella, Ronald Martella, and Flint Simonsen.

Additionally, an article recently published in the Journal of School Psychology 47 (2009), pp. 187-214 showed that students using SRA Reading Mastery scored highest in a Florida Reading Achievement study. The study states, "Overall, students in the Reading Mastery curriculum demonstrated generally greater overall Oral Reading Fluency growth than students in other curricula. Also, they more frequently met or exceeded benchmarks for adequate achievement in first, second, and third grade. In first grade, regardless of SES (socioeconomic status), students generally met adequate achievement benchmarks. Among second graders, on average, only students using Reading Mastery and Success for All met benchmarks, while the lowest scores for students were among those using Houghton Mifflin. In third grade, on average, students did not reach the adequate achievement benchmark. However, Reading Mastery students came closest to the benchmarks because scores among these students were the highest across curricula."

About Lindamood Bell LiPS and Visualizing and Verbalizing (Click on the "Research" link at www.lindamoodbell.com)
The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPs) Program stimulates phonemic awareness.
The Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking program helps improve reading comprehension, oral language expression and comprehension, and written language skills by improving visual concept imagery.

About REWARDS
REWARDS is an acronym for Reading Excellence: Word Attack and Rate Development Strategies. It is an intense, short-term intervention reading program that is specifically designed for students in 4th through 12th grades who have mastered skills associated with 1st- and 2nd grade reading but have difficulty reading long words and/or who read slowly (i.e., 60 to 120 correct words per minute). REWARDS provides those intermediate and secondary students who read between a 2.5 and 5.0 reading level with flexible strategies for decoding multi-syllabic words in order to build reading accuracy and fluency.

About Language for Learning
Language for Learning provides students with the knowledge and understanding of language they need to achieve proficiency and reading comprehension. This oral language program teaches children the words, concepts, and statements important to both oral and written language, and helps enable them to extend this knowledge to other areas of their development.

About Language! and Language! Roots
Language! provides explicit, systematic, research-bases instruction to struggling readers, writers, speakers, and spellers. Instruction establishes skills in phonemic awareness and phonics, word recognition and spelling, vocabulary and morphology, and grammar and usage. Students will learn to read and listen to multiple levels of text selections; build content background, vocabulary, comprehension skills, and fluency; organize thoughts, write increasingly sophisticated text, and communicate effectively through the writing process.

Math
About SRA Connecting Math Concepts (see www.sraonline.com)
Connecting Math Concepts introduces ideas gradually and teaches students the connections between concepts. Focusing on the big ideas of mathematics, Connecting Math Concepts teaches explicit strategies that enable students to master difficult ideas such as ratios, proportions, probability, functions, and data analysis. Detailed explanations and guided practice move students toward independent work, ensuring that students gain success and confidence as mathematical thinkers.

About Lindamood Bell's On Cloud Nine Math Program
The On Cloud Nine® Math Program integrates concept imagery and numeral imagery with language, and applies that processing to math computation and problem solving. On Cloud Nine uses manipulatives, imagery, and language to develop the underlying math concepts for reasoning and problem solving with numbers. Beginning with the most basic concepts of counting, adding, and subtracting, the steps progress to word problems, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals.

About Mastering Math Facts
Mastering Math Facts is a structured program for sequential practice of math facts.
Successful practice on math facts requires that students practice and learn few enough facts at a time so that they can simply remember or memorize the answers.

Spelling
About SRA Spelling Mastery (see www.sraonline.com)
Spelling Mastery teaches students spelling skills by blending phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word approaches according to student's skill development.

Written Expression
About SRA Reasoning and Writing (see www.sraonline.com)
Reasoning and Writing integrates higher-level thinking with writing instruction to help students express ideas efficiently and effectively.