Reading with TLC

TRAINING

Reading with TLC, Parts I and II, Seminar Structure

This is a two-day (ten hours total) workshop in which participants are trained in the use of Lively Letters: Multisensory Mnemonic Letter Card Program and Sight Words You Can See. Participants learn language-based, structured techniques for training letter sound associations, phonemic awareness, decoding, encoding, and acquisition of sight words. Demonstrations, hands-on practice, and videos of students in small group and classroom settings enhance the learning experience during this dynamic workshop. In order to facilitate immediate implementation of the workshop techniques, participants of the Reading with TLC workshops are required to purchase the basic sets of the two published programs mentioned above. The products are distributed on the day of the workshop.

On day one of the seminar, participants are presented with an overview of the current research regarding the normal development of reading, guidelines for diagnosing and remediating reading disorders, and the role of phonemic awareness in the development of phonics. The Lively Letters characters are introduced, and participants learn how to use these mnemonic letter cards to train all of the letter sounds of our language. Oral kinesthetic cues, imagery, and mnemonics are integrated in a unique way, providing students with a powerful self-cueing mechanism for rapid retrieval of the letter sounds. Specific research-based techniques for training phonemic awareness (blending, segmenting, and manipulation) are demonstrated, and practiced by participants, at the simple syllable level, facilitating the development of decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) skills.

On day two of the seminar, participants receive practice in training higher level phonemic awareness skills (tasks at the complex syllable level), along with additional strategies for decoding and encoding words containing the more challenging letter patterns (soft ‘c’, ‘y’ as a vowel…). The more vigorous manipulative techniques presented will serve to improve not only phonemic awareness, but also orthographic awareness, the visual attention to specific sequences of letters within words. Specific structured, language-based techniques for training decoding and encoding multisyllable words are also presented, using unique mnemonic strategies for rule acquisition and use. Creative sample lessons are offered and demonstrated for small group and classroom use of the Reading with TLC methods. Instruction then moves into the area of sight word training, where participants learn to use Sight Words You Can See to train 84 of the most difficult, and phonetically irregular, sight words. This program builds upon the students’ knowledge of phonics, as the sight words are grouped systematically according to the grapho-phonemic structure of the words. Mnemonic stories and images are the essential cueing components of this unique sight word approach. Reading fluency is one of the final components addressed on the second day.